South Asia Daily

Before you straighten your hair and use your cell phone…

If death has a smell, it ought to be like the pungent odor of formaldehyde. In its liquid form called formalin, the organic compound (CH2O) has long been used in mortuaries as well as laboratories to preserve both bodies and individual organs.

The somewhat pale yellow liquid that dead things float in in laboratory jars is formaldehyde. It is ironic that a compound that preserves organs and bodies so well has now been added to the list of known carcinogens by the U.S. government that it says may cause cancer. What it means is that while formaldehyde can kill you, it can also preserve you once it has killed you. If there is a chemical compound more ironic than formaldehyde, I would like to know.

At room temperature formaldehyde is gaseous but it is known as formalin in a liquid form. There is something utterly clinical about the smell of formaldehyde. For a long time the odor used to remind me of something otherworldly as well. There is a reason for that. It seems formaldehyde widely exists in interstellar space. That may explain why I feel the way I feel every time I have encountered formaldehyde smell. I feel as if I am floating around in interstellar space.

The list of carcinogens is always growing and the appearance of formaldehyde is no surprise because it was long suspected to have very harmful effects. There are reports that the chemical industry fought hard to keep it off the list because of its very extensive use in building materials of all kinds.

Incidentally, it is also used in hair straightening products. So next time you seem a woman with unnaturally straight and ironed hair, gabbing away on her cell phone, you know she is tempting fate. For those of you who may not get the connection (no pun intended) mobile phones are also on the list of carcinogens now for their potential to cause cancerous brain tumor because of the radiation.

Tariq Ali, circa 1984 and 2011

Writer and dissenter Tariq Ali in 2011 (left) and in 1984

When I interviewed writer and dissenter Tariq Ali in 1984 his demeanor was rough hewn. Even as he seemed amused by the the media attention he got during his brief stopover in Bombay, he was equally eager to share his views. Over a quarter century later he appears polished in a professorial sort of way, although he still gives you the sense that given half a chance he could take the gloves off and take to the street to protest a wrong of historic proportions.

The main purpose of his visit then was to attend a debate on “Has the Left any future in India?” that was hosted by The Telegraph newspaper. In the context of West Bengal, the question has been partially answered after over a quarter century in the victory of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress Party by defeating the Communist Party of India (Marxist) government. Whether that means the Left has no future left is another matter.

I happened to catch an interview with Ali with Riz Khan on Al Jazeera English and was transported back to 1984. While Khan’s conversation with Ali is far more reflective and personal, mine was more focused on the immediate situation in Pakistan, a country he had left for good in January, 1977. That was the time when General Zia ul Haq had banned his entry. I asked Ali how long Zia might last, “At the most five years from now.” I then suggested that the regime looked well entrenched. To which Ali said, “A smiling Zia in Indian newspapers does not mean he commands popular support. His days are numbered.”

His days were indeed numbered. Four years after Ali gave him at best five years, Zia was killed in a plane crash on August 17, 1988. The crash was widely believed by the Pakistanis to have been an assassination. Of course, Ali had a somewhat different idea to oust Zia ouster. He was for a popular uprising but he also noted that the people of Pakistan were “tired.” “How many times can they take to the street?” was his question.

Firebrand is a word routinely used to describe Ali. That worked for him perfectly in 1984. In 2011, a better description would be contemplative. He does speak about his friendship with John Lennon and Mick Jagger and having to live for the last 30 years “in a period of defeat” in so much as it concerns the marginalization of his leftwing ideology. “It is not pleasant but one accepts it,” he says. While that comment is not necessarily out of character for Ali, I wonder whether he could have said it with such ease in 1984.

Here is my conversation with him.

On a separate note, it is amazing how similar men of certain background sound, not in terms of their views and thinking, but in the way they intone.

Joys of a kitschy mythological

Serendipity on YouTube is so commonplace that it should no longer be called serendipity. As always an unexpected song popped out of some obscure recess of my memory yesterday and I started singing “Wadiyon mein kho jayen hum tum” from the movie ‘Aarambh’ composed by Anand Shankar and sung by Mukesh and Aarti Mukherjee. It is one of those reasonably melodious songs which take over your entire day for no fathomable reason.

As I played it a couple of times on YouTube my eyes serendipitously spotted the above trailer on the right hand suggestions sidebar. Something told me it had to be unintentionally hilarious. And it was. What Sean Connery was to James Bond, Dara Singh was to Hanuman (or Jeevan to Narad or Nana Palsikar to a TB patient or Jagdish Raaj to a police inspector). So it is Dara Singh in the title role of Bajrangbali, managing about two and a quarter expressions, partly because of his innate inability to act but also because his facial movements were restricted by the mold which he had to wear to create a simian face.

I was told once by a makeup man in Bombay that they used to shave off tennis balls, cut them into half and then paint them to match the skin tone of an actor playing Hanuman. Split tennis balls are a good approximation of the simian facial structure. The mold on the actor’s face would frequently come unstuck in the middle of a shot because the studio’s heat would melt the adhesive. If you wanted to prove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in the shortest possible time the set of a Ramayan mythological was the place to go to.

This trailer has to be viewed with a degree of philosophical detachment and tolerance in order to get the full measure of its unplanned hilarity. When you see Biswajeet as Ram, you struggle to reconcile with the idea of Sita, as played by the lovely Moushumi Chatterjee, leaving Ravan for Ram even though she was abducted by the former. You half expect her to wonder aloud, “Must I return to that flatbread Biswajeet? Premnath’s moustache has more personality.”

Biswajeet as Ram (left) and Premnath as Ravan

Perhaps the most credible presence is that of Premnath as Ravan. He says with characteristic expansiveness, “Hum Lankesh hein. Jo nahi karte voh paap hein. Aur jo karten hein, voh punya hein.” Come to think of it, it’s a pretty good line which I would put in the same league as “Hawa tej chalta hai Dinkar Rao, Topi samhalo, ud jayega” from Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Agneepath'.’

The movie’s special effects add to its unintentional comical quotient. Pay particular attention to the scene where Hanuman splits open his own chest with his bare hands as if he is about to perform an instant bypass surgery to unclog his arteries. What he is really doing is illustrating that the stuff that is clogging his heart is not high cholesterol but his total devotion to Ram and Sita who reside in his heart. There is hardly any effort made to hide Dara Singh’s fake nylon skin. It’s priceless.

Produced and directed by Chandrakant, ‘Bajrangbali’ is an unintentional masterpiece of the kitschy mythological genre that must be celebrated not because it was good but because of the earnestness with which it was made.

As an aside, the movie features perhaps the worst ever musical score by the otherwise hugely talented Kalyanji Anandji.

P.S.: To those readers of this blog who know nothing about them, I am sorry to have used some obscure pop cultural references such as Nana Palsikar and Jagdish Raaj. You will just have to live with those.

Note to self: Do not forget to get your head examined next week for, first dredging out ‘Wadiyon mein kho jayen” and then dissecting ‘Bajrangbali’.

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

This brutally raw documentary of the 2009 elimination of the Tamil Tigers separatist guerrillas by the Sri Lankan military needs no explanation. Channel 4 of Britain has ignited quite a global debate over how Sri Lanka decimated the unnervingly violent separatists and in the process possibly exposed its own unchecked instinct for violence and brutality.

More than anything else the scenes here reaffirm, if any was needed, how primal the human race really is.

This non-sense about Hindi cinema and soft power

In recent years, there has been some chronicling in the Western media of Hindi cinema’s globally felt ‘soft power’. There has also been the inevitable comparison between how Hollywood has over the decades advanced what is somewhat inaccurately characterized as American culture and how Hindi cinema has also been a purveyor of some elements of Indian culture.

The underlying point about this perspective is about how popular cinema and those movie stars who embody it together constitute that ‘soft power’, a term originally coined by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye. Kalyani Vittala, a contributor for the Christian Science Monitor, takes note of this while writing about the three-day International Indian Film Academy Awards (IIFA) being hosted in Toronto this year between June 23-25.

Vittala quotes Nye as saying, "Hollywood played a significant role in developing the soft power that helped to end the Cold War. I hope that Bollywood can help India with its image among its neighbors [such as traditional rivals Pakistan and China]." He also observes that in many countries Bollywood films are more popular than Hollywood films.

I have always found the assertions of Hindi cinema’s ‘soft power’ highly exaggerated at best and utterly bogus at worst. As far as I can tell no one watches Hindi cinema for its politically transformational effects just as those who make it do not do so with any conscious or subconscious wish to change the course of world history or fundamentally influencing those who watch it. Nye’s hope that Hindi cinema can help its image among its neighbors has been belied so consistently that it bears no mentioning ever again.

It is foolish to treat a bunch of star-struck members of the South Asian Diaspora in Toronto or Jersey City or Durban or Birmingham as a serious scientific sample and extrapolate from that something that has no real basis. Also, unlike Hollywood, which has ridden the enormous military and economic might of the United States, Hindi cinema has no such carrier to hitch a ride on.

It is true that a large number of people in Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East watch and genuinely enjoy Hindi movies with considerable enthusiasm. We all have our own little stories of meeting a taxi driver from Sudan educating us about Amitabh Bachchan’s hairstyle or a middle-aged bartender from Russia gushing over Mithun Chkaraborty’s gyrations. But none of those anecdotes add up to a grandiose intellectual term such as ‘soft power.’

The whole point of the kind of Hindi cinema that is supposed to represent India’s soft power is that it is produced without any attention to whether it will advance the Indian cultural agenda. The average Hindi filmmaker spends no time or energy pondering over his or her product’s deeper cultural significance because he or she is generally incapable of a complex formulation such as soft power.

The notion of Hindi cinema as soft power presumes that a great deal of thoughtfulness and brain storming precedes a typical Hindi potboiler’s making. To those who harbor this absurd notion I would strongly recommend to go and observe the process of writing and making a regular Hindi movie.

There is a tendency to read deeper meanings into the spread of popular culture where none exists.In the particular case of Hindi cinema the whole idea is to offer close to three hours of escapist melodrama without any identifiable purpose or motivation. I do not mean to belittle the genre or those who like it, although I personally find all of it embarrassing. My point is if those who produce such cinema do so without any awareness about or interest in creating soft power, why is that those who write about it find deeper cultural meanings?

As for events such as IIFA, they are nothing more than movie star jamborees which are hosted by the dozens in India. They mean nothing and do nothing to advance cinematic excellence. They are meant for precisely the kind of people who think that Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is an epic worthy of doctoral dissertation.

India among top five countries hostile to women

A combination of female feticide, infanticide and human trafficking makes India the world’s fourth most dangerous place for women, a new global survey says.

The survey by TrustLaw, a Thomson Reuters Foundation, places India among the five most dangerous countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Afghanistan tops the survey followed by the Congo.

If there is any saving grace here at all, it says, “Some experts said the world's largest democracy was relatively forthcoming about describing its problems, possibly casting it in a darker light than if other countries were equally transparent about trafficking.”

What this means is that the country is more candid about the existence of the huge problem of trafficking and not necessarily effective about being able to reduce it.

According to India’s Home Ministry, in 2009 some 100 million people, mostly women and girls, were involved in trafficking.

"The practice is common but lucrative so it goes untouched by government and police,"  the survey quotes Cristi Hegranes, founder of the Global Press institute, as saying.

The Central Bureau of Investigation estimated that in 2009 about 90 percent of trafficking took place within the country and that there were some 3 million prostitutes, of which about 40 percent were children.

Then there is the issue of female feticide, something I have been tracking since 1986. Some 50 million girls are considered “missing” over the past century by the United Nations Population Fund. These are the girls who died as a result of both feticide and infanticide precisely because they were girls.

The 2010 census of India revealed the country’s sex ratio for children under six years to be a disturbing 914 girls to every 1000 boys. A significant part of the cause was feticide and infanticide.

I am sure the survey would enrage vast swaths of the Indian middle class, some of whom would predictably argue that women are treated as goddesses in India and hence the findings are biased and bogus. That is as specious an argument as it can get.

Sagarmatha v. Everest

Jeff Botz (Courtesy Jeff Botz as distributed by IANS)

American photographer Jeff Botz wants Nepal to rename the world’s tallest mountain Sagarmatha, its original Nepalese name before the British named it after the second Surveyor General of India, George Everest.

Sudeshna Sarkar of the IANS reports from Kathmandu that Botz wants Nepal to assert its "sovereign right to control affairs within (its) borders".

"The mountain is more of an intellectual property... and intellectual properties have great value to the person or organization that claims and controls them... Your name is your brand. Name recognition will benefit all Nepali exports, goodwill, tourism, and financial wellbeing. There is nothing Nepal could do to promote its name more effectively than to assert its right to rename this mountain as Sagarmatha," Botz says.

It was in 1856 that an Indian overseer, Radhanath Sikdar determined that what was simple called Peak XV was, in fact, the world’s tallest mountain. That was a full nine years before Britain's Royal Geographical Society named it Mount Everest. Ironically, it is not even certain whether the great surveyor ever set his eyes on the mountain that immortalizes his name.

Nepal was never colonized by the British and Botz finds it strange that a mountain within its territory, not to mention the world’s tallest one, was named after a British civil servant who had no connection with it.

A couple of points about Anthony Weiner’s dick

US Congressman Anthony Weiner (Pic: http://www.weiner.house.gov/)

There is a simple rule of playwriting. If there is a gun hanging on the wall in a scene, it better have some rationale. It cannot just hang there for no reason. It has to have a purpose. I think the dick-flashing US Congressman Anthony Weiner violated that simple rule in the political theater that has just played out in America. Evidently, the gun was merely hanging there without a purpose.

People are baffled that he sent out explicit sexual images and messages to half a dozen women using Twitter, Facebook and email without ever trying to have sex with them. I suspect that part of the clamor by his fellow lawmakers to force him to resign is because he did not go the distance. How dare he just tease is the question.

If I have chosen not to comment on the feisty Democratic Congressman’s tawdry predicaments so far, it is because I see that as a non-issue as long as it is clearly established that he did not send those images to girls below the legal age of consent. His detractors have argued that if he can lie about such indulgences, one can never be sure what else he has been lying about. That’s a fair point and I do not have an effective counterpoint other than saying that one does not necessarily flow from the other.

I am sure Weiner would eventually sort out what seems to be an addiction for him, but my general response to this fake controversy is characteristically broader than just him. We live in times when the bulge in a man’s underwear could be a stick of RDX and not his barely concealed arousal. Aren’t we better off with men in whose underwear the bulge is what it should be and not something wired and triggered by an insane ideology? Just a thought. You might disagree.

Delhi’s Slut Walk

What began as a local protest in response to a Toronto police officer’s utterly misogynist counsel that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized" has now become a global movement known as the Slut Walk.

There could not be a more symbolic city for a Slut Walk than New Delhi where the overriding male belief is that women are asking to be felt up, molested and raped unless they vehemently say no. And once they say no, it is open season on them.

The Delhi Slut Walk is scheduled for June 25 when thousands of women in India’s capital are expected to dress up deliberately slutty in order to make the point that there is nothing like a woman asking for it. I support this 100 percent and more as long as the walk’s organizers do not make the mistake of translating Slut Walk into Hindi.

Although slut literally means a prostitute or a woman of easy morals, in recent years in the West its core meaning has lost some of its hurtful edge and become a term of casual use to describe women generally lacking in finesse and refinement. But make no mistake, in India perhaps its nearest equivalent Randi retains all of its profoundly debasing and hurtful meaning. There is another term that has much less currency called Chalu to describe women of often perceived easy availability.

I am curious to see what sartorial version of the slut that women in Delhi would turn out in. The fundamental point of the movement is that no matter how provocatively dressed she is there is nothing like a woman inviting sexual assault and sexual violence. There is absolutely no extenuating circumstance, none whatsoever, under which a woman can be said to be inviting or asking for sexual assault or violence.

I am equally curious to see how the city’s administration and police handle the protest that may draw thousands of women, not to mention as many oglers. My only apprehension about the Delhi Slut Walk is that it may become a hunting ground for a large number of men who already believe that when a woman says no she is merely acting coy. It is no coincidence that a woman is raped in Delhi every 18 hours and molested every 14, according to the local police.

Cilveks muks, mistikis—Majanks Chaja

 

After days of heavy, legal writing it is time for something more personal and even self-serving. I have just received the cover of the Latvian edition of my Dalai Lama book. Of all the 20 odd language covers of ‘Man Monk Mystic’ since its first publication in 2007, this one is probably the most unusual.

I like the cover because it has some of the elements of mandala colors. The texture feels like mandala colored sands. It is not surprising that when I received it some days ago, I reflexively tried to wipe it out like Buddhist monks would do with mandalas. I hope the edition is a little less impermanent than that.

****

Speaking of books,I have just begun crafting one on the recently concluded Tahawwur Hussain Rana trial. The good thing with the trial is that the story tells itself. Once the word of my book spread around (in no small measure by myself) it was as if characters started fleshing themselves out without any help from me.

There is something in the line “I am writing a book about this” that unfairly elevates one’s status. It is as if that one simple statement separates you from the rest of the crowd and gives you extra license to hold forth on the matter at hand. One also feels caught in a slow motion loop in the midst of general frenzy.

I saw everything at the trial from the perspective of the book, including the sharply contrasting styles of the two defense attorneys, Patrick Blegen and Charles Swift as well as that of the prosecutor, Assistant US Attorney Daniel Collins.