South Asia Daily

A few points about the Oscars

Actor and comedian Chris Rock (Photo: Screengrab from www.oscars.go.com)

As a first time documentarian and not yet nominated for anything at all, I offer unqualified praise and laughter to comedian and actor Louis C K for his devastatingly apt description of those who are in that profession.

Last night while presenting the Oscar in the Best Documentary Short Film category, Louis said, “"You cannot make a dime on this. These people will never be rich as long as they live. So this Oscar means something because all they do is tell stories that are important…This Oscar is going home in a Honda Civic. This Oscar is the nicest thing they ever own in their life. It’s going to give them anxiety to keep it in their crappy apartment."

In my case, on top of being a first time documentarian with ‘Gandhi’s Song’ (a neat plug) I am also a seasoned print journalist with 34 years in the profession. That makes me doubly penurious. By some strange coincidence I do drive a Honda Civic which is also my “crappy apartment.” The last bit about my Honda Civic also being my apartment is not true but it could become true any moment.

Although Chris Rock was outstanding as the host, particularly in the shadow of the #OscarsSoWhite movement, I thought this one bit by Louis was perhaps the quip of the night. Rock’s opening was withering and funny at once, the hallmark of a great comedian and soci0cultural observer. However, in terms of jokes that fit the night perfectly Louis’ bit was brilliant. For me it was particularly hilarious because it was so personal. In a way Louis made a case for himself as the next year’s Oscars host without really trying to do it.

Making a documentary is not mandatory for me. No one has asked me to make it. I have done so entirely of my own volition. So I cannot possibly complain about the hardship it entails. My hardship, of course, is a direct consequence of the fact that I was born. That’s a different story.

Rock was widely anticipated to help rescue some of the prestige of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by subjecting it to some severe flagellation for its egregious failure in recognizing diversity among actors and others. In a sense, the Academy members were engaging in an act of very public penance by not standing in the way of Rock’s well-known scalding sociocultural and political humor. He did not disappoint. His opening monologue was razor sharp.

In a particularly stinging description he said Hollywood was not “burning-cross racist” but “sorority racist.” In my viewing Oscars for a long time I have not heard any host construct their word with such hurtful precision. I was reminded of a scene from ‘Becket’ where Peter O’Toole playing King Henry II of England subjects himself to ritual whipping Saxon monks to assuage his sense of guilt about the way Richard Burton playing Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered.

On a separate note, clocking over three hours the Oscars were just too long. They were so long that Chris Rock aged during them and became Morgan Freeman at the end.

I do not have anything much to say about the winners because actors and technicians win every year and that’s that.

On another point, the set design of the stage was superb.

A novella inspired by Gunwantray Acharya’s ‘Dariyalal’

My first introduction to the subject of Gujarati merchants’ involvement in the slave trade out of Africa in the mid and late 18th century was through the great Gunwantray Acharya’s Gujarati novel ‘Dariyalal’. I have written about the book in these columns a few times before.

In recent weeks, I have begun reading up some serious academic literature on the subject only to discover how extensive and old that involvement was. I am particularly struck by the work of Pedro Machado, Associate Professor, Department of History, at Indiana University in Bloomington. His paper “Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave Trade, c.1730-1830” lends academic substance to Acharya’s extraordinary fictionalization of the theme which resonates with historical accuracy.

What I find particularly remarkable that in ‘Dariyalal’, whose first edition came out in 1938, Acharya wove his plot around a fictional Gujarati firm called Jayram Shivji that was involved in slave trade apart from other goods.  Prof. Machado’s paper mentions two leading Gujarati firms Laxmichand Motichand and Shobhachand Sowchand and their involvement in the slave trade apart from trade in ivory and other materials. According to Prof. Machado’s paper, Laxmichand Motichand was one of the most prominent Gujarati merchants in Mozambique who “visited the southern coast (Sofala) in 1781 and in 1785 sailed twice to Quelimane.”

Acharya’s does not specifically talk about Mozambique but his description of the east coast of Africa could be pretty broad in terms of its geographical spread. Here is a translated passage from the novel:

“Nazambi or Mother Nature has loaded it up with her bounties. Fruits fall from its sky-high trees. Clusters of cloves scatter everywhere. Resin drops drip and coconuts crash on their own. Nothing requires to be harvested or plucked or picked or scratched or dug out. Like a mother serving everything to her child, Nazambi is full of blessings.

Everything on this Dark Continent is on a gigantic scale—the forests are gigantic, the mountains are sky-high, the lakes are overflowing with enough water to quench the world’s thirst and the animals are enormous.

When night falls on this continent, there is surreal quiet and the wind blowing through its thick forests unleashes a frightening scream.

But something even scarier has cast its deep shadow on this continent for the past three hundred years.

Bandits overrun Bomas (villages), torch settlements, massacre the old and the children, capture young men and women, and shackle them.

There is always a boat anchored along the coast under its shroud-like sails. The bandits would force their captives on to the boats and set off.

The boat would then leave for Turkey, Iran or America.”

As Acharya says in the preface to the first edition published in 1938, he drew on many real life people and events and carried out intensive research to produce a fictionalized account of the era. The authentic feel of the novel has everything to do with the author’s meticulous research. It is in this context that I am excited to find Prof. Machado’s paper.

For quite sometime, I had been contemplating to write a novella inspired by ‘Dariyalal’. In particular, I wanted to develop a story out of Acharya’s  protagonist Ramjibha, the former much dreaded head of Jayram Shivji’s slave department, who turns a reformed rehabilitator trading cloves for slaves. I have been working on that novella for a while. So it was only fortuitous that yesterday I chanced upon Prof. Machado’s work. My novella is set in the late 18th century and is about a character called Tendaji, which in Swahili means someone who makes things happen.

Of decapitation and related matters

There is a long tradition in Indian pop culture of either playfully or menacingly wielding the threat or expressing the willingness of cutting one’s head off to reinforce a claim or a position. Hindi movies have used the threat or willingness to decapitate in song lyrics and dialogue. It is mostly used in the tone of deliberate overstatement or mock seriousness. Offering one’s head as the ultimate word of honor is a thing in South Asia and many parts of the world.

I can recall two songs offhand. Apni azadi ko hum hargiz mita sakte nahi, sar kata sakte hain lekin sar jhuka sakte nahi (‘Leader’ 1964, We cannot destroy our independence, We may let our heads be cut off but not be bowed), Suno jana suno jana, mere pehlu se mat jana, agar jana to yunh jana, juda sar tan se kar jana (Listen darling, don’t leave me, If you do, do after separating my head from my body, ‘Hum Sab Ustad Hain, 1965). The first song has a deep political purpose while the second just a pick up line.

A couple of days ago India’s Human Resource Minister Smriti Irani, fighting off a highly charged opposition lawmakers over her handling of the suicide by hanging of a university student in Hyderabad, said in Hindi in parliament, “सर कलम कर के आप के क़दमों में छोड़ देंगे. (I will decapitate myself and lay my head at your feet)” if the opposition were not persuaded by her reply.

Political grandstanding is not unique to India. It has been used as long as there has been a political system in the world. Politicians are known to offer the defense “Hang me if I am found guilty” to silence their detractors with both sides knowing well that it is just posturing and grandstanding. However, my focus is not the widespread nature of such grandiosity. My concern is more operational.

When I heard Mrs. Irani declare with her well-known flourish in parliament, “सर कलम कर के आप के क़दमों में छोड़ देंगे” my natural inclination to take people at their face value and their word literally kicked in. Given that the opposition would never be satisfied with her explanation, would she be left with the choice of carrying out her threat? Of course, everyone knows that such promises/threats are not to be taken literally but what if one did for the sheer macabre fun of it?

If one does, then it creates a few operational challenges. 1) How does one decapitate oneself? 2) And having decapitated, how does one manage to walk up to a particular person and leave one's head at that person's feet?

I would suspect that decapitation would lead to a whole host of issues related to motor skills and navigation for the brain (nervous system) inside a head that is no longer attached to the torso, legs and hands. Coordination will be a nightmare. Such questions do bother me even on a Saturday morning.

Quiet joys of Camille Pissarro

La Récolte des Foins, Éragny, 1887, Camille Pissarro

I have known about the painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) for a while now but it is only in the past week or so that I have begun to look at his works with great attention. I am blown away by his brilliance.

More pertinently, I am quite struck by how Pissarro’s works can seem similar to Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) in terms of their technique, particularly their pointillist brush strokes. One has to remember that Pissarro was much older than van Gogh and had been painting much before him. In fact, van Gogh did spend time with Pissarro in Paris in 1886. Van Gogh has been quoted as saying that he learned from Pissarro that  “you must boldly exaggerate the effects of either harmony or discord which colors produce.” (I found this reference on the website www.painters-table.com edited by the artist Brett Baker.)

I may be in over my head here but it is my case that Pissarro and van Gogh are in a way two personalities of one single painter. While van Gogh’s works have a certain disquiet even when they are exuberant and boldly exaggerated, Pissarro’s have a measure of quietude about them that goes close to being serene. However, in the way they executed their works, their brushwork is very alike. Using my favorite Google Art Project I went very tight on Pissarro’s works and found that the more I zoomed in, the less I could tell whose works they were—Pissarro’s or van Gogh’s. Now, that might well be because of the way the paint of the late 19th century clung to canvas but the brushwork seems nearly indistinguishable. That may also have to do with the fact that both the masters employed pointillism. I have cited a few close-ups here.

Peasants’ Houses, 1887, Camille Pissarro

A close-up of a section the same painting

The Oise near Pontoise in Grey Weather, 1876, Pissarro

A close-up of a section of the same painting

The two examples above hopefully make my case about Pissarro and van Gogh. If I showed you just two the close-ups, you would be hard-pressed to tell me whether they were from van Gogh or Pissarro. Those who really know and understand art and techniques far better than I do might attribute it to the way the overall Impressionist genre worked. Nevertheless, I am sticking to my case.

The point about the Impressionist genre using pointillism as the main technique is that it is not painted to be a precise representation of what the painter might be depicting. That is why it is called Impressionism. The point is that when you see the painting as a whole and from some distance you feel that the emotional/visual content of what the painter might have felt. Take for example, the close-up immediate above from the same Oise near Pontoise work. The lines of the man on the horse and the man and the woman talking are not sharply defined and yet you get a clear sense.

From what I have seen of Pissarro’s works, they all have a certain quietude about them. Van Gogh had that too when he chose to but his works do have a certain underlying frenzy as well. Pissarro, in contrast, seemed more anchored within himself. Take for instance his 1897 work ‘Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather’, in Paris. It is a boulevard and hence has all the hubbub of a boulevard ad yet it does not seem to be in a hurry.

Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather,1897, Pissarro

A close-up of a section in that painting below shows how a great painter can visualize what a particular element has to be painted so that it would make visual sense from a distance. I have zoomed in on what appears to be a horse-drawn cart with lovely olive green brushstrokes around the frame.

More on Apple versus government

Whether or not he succeeds, it is remarkable in itself that Apple chief executive Tim Cook can even refuse to yield to a court order in a textbook case of collective security taking precedence over individual privacy. What is even more remarkable is that Cook can harden his stand against the order demanding that the iPhone 5C belonging to the San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook who along with his wife killed 14 people last December be opened up through a backdoor program overriding Apple’s security. In a sense it is a tribute to America that companies and individuals have the freedom to stand contrary to the obvious wisdom.

Now Cook has been quoted as saying by ABC that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) attempts to get Apple to open up Farook’s phone is like being asked to engineer the “software equivalent of cancer”. I wonder in how many other countries a company chief would be able to take the position that Cook is taking without any immediate political, legal and economic jeopardy.

I am not going into the merit or otherwise of Cook’s stance but merely pointing out the robustness of the political and legal culture of a country where it could be taken at all. Of course, it is entirely possible that for Cook and Apple there could be a whole variety of other price to pay as a result of this intransigence. For now though he is able to resist pressures in a case that many consider a slam dunk in favor of overriding Apple security. In his ABC interview Cook makes an interesting albeit delicate distinction. “When you think of those which are known compared to what might be there, I believe we are making the right choice,” Cook said in an apparent counter to the argument that the data on Farook’s locked out phone could contain more significant information for the FBI. 

To call the FBI request the “software equivalent of cancer” is an extraordinary pushback from Cook and Apple. Rather than at all yielding, there are now speculations that Apple’s engineers might even work on ways to make opening up phones technically impossible altogether. As the world becomes an increasingly technology-dependent and driven society, the Apple versus FBI constitutes a dramatic standoff. I would not bet on the outcome either way but considering what Cook told ABC there will be no backing down. “We need to stand tall, and stand tall on principle,” he said. “This should not be happening in America.”

I am not quite sure if the Apple refusal amounts of obstruction of justice in a legal sense but the FBI would do all it can to prevail and the company all it can not to yield. The basic point of the case is that Apple is refusing to write software that can open up individual iPhones on the strength of the argument that the company could then be forced to embed all manners of monitoring and spyware by law enforcement agencies. In a society that is at once so anal about individual freedom and privacy and yet like a sieve where people give out the most information publicly without losing a beat, this is a highly engaging debate.

Apple’s website carries a detailed statement explaining why it is taking the stand it is taking.

“Smartphones, led by iPhone, have become an essential part of our lives. People use them to store an incredible amount of personal information, from our private conversations to our photos, our music, our notes, our calendars and contacts, our financial information and health data, even where we have been and where we are going.

All that information needs to be protected from hackers and criminals who want to access it, steal it, and use it without our knowledge or permission. Customers expect Apple and other technology companies to do everything in our power to protect their personal information, and at Apple we are deeply committed to safeguarding their data.

Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us.

For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.”

It also says this:

The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.

We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack. For years, cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against weakening encryption. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their data. Criminals and bad actors will still encrypt, using tools that are readily available to them.

Watching the delightfully quirky ‘Mon Oncle’

Tati by Mayank Chhaya

Years ago I had chanced upon a movie that I remembered visually and mainly for a particular house that was futuristic, modernist, automated and sanitized in the 1950s vision of a futuristic, modernist, automated and sanitized house. I wracked my brain trying to remember what that movie was because I found it delightfully quirky and astutely shot. I couldn’t come up with the name until this morning by a pure serendipity.

Facebook friend Arka Paul put up a link to a piece by Jonathan Melville of The Scotsman about the Hulot universe as envisioned by Jacques Tati. That brought back the memories of a brilliantly animated film called The Illusionist that I had watched on YouTube sometime ago.On the list of videos on the right hand side of that film I found ‘Mon Oncle’, the 1958 movie by the inordinately talented Jacques Tati. This was precisely the film I was trying to remember.

Watching Tati’s “Mon Oncle” is a weirdly amusing experience with the director effortlessly traveling between what are two sharply divided French cities. One is an old French city, full of street exuberance, chatty people drinking and eating at bistros on the cobbled pavements, stray dogs looking for anything they can eat in the garbage but still full of soul. The other is a meticulously structured, if somewhat soulless one where buildings are sharply laid out and one home in particular, the one where the protagonist family lives, is a treat in what a house should be and what a home shouldn’t.

It is strange that even while watching it and switching between the two quarters I felt a sense of being stifled in the modernist and liberated in the other one. This is notwithstanding that I am by temperament more in favor of the former. I would not like to go into the whole plot of the film other than saying that Tati (1909-1982), who had such a quirky point of view on comedy, was a remarkable filmmaker who made only six feature films. ‘Mon Oncle’ draws you in immediately with the opening scenes of street dogs rummaging through garbage and one of them eventually ending up in the modernist house.

‘Mon Oncle’ is more like a silent film where the audio happens unexpectedly and deliberately incomprehensibly. It is the triumph of Tati’s unusual ability to tell a predominantly visual story and to that end the modernist house is a character in itself. I strongly recommend you watch it. It is available on YouTube here.

Inspired by the movie, I did a quick painting this morning which illustrates the post above.

A few disjointed points about goings-on in India

I have resisted the temptation of saying anything at all about the apparently rising tide of political and ideological biliousness and recrimination, not to mention lawyerly thuggishness and embarrassing broadcast media grandstanding, coupled with prognostications of doom and destruction which are characterizing a section of India these days.

I have avoided it mainly because I am sitting thousands of miles from the action and cannot pretend to feel the angst firsthand even though over my long journalistic career I have reported on enough of such collective fulminations to know exactly goes down in the midst of mobs.

With The New York Times now jumping in editorially, I am still resisting the temptation of putting my own spin on it. That is mainly because I am acutely conscious of the futility of opining over any social unrest. Opining takes zero talent and makes even less difference. So what now, now that the venerable Times editorial board has let us know what it thinks? Other than those who write such edits and some who read them who might become any the wiser? Those who harbor the kind of “lynch-mob mentality”  that the Times talks about do not read the Times edits and, if they do, they couldn’t give any less fucks. The lynch-mob that the newspaper talks about consists of zealots who ransack a university campus to count the number of used condoms and crumpled beers cans to assert their view that permissiveness and decadence  have overrun India’s youth and universities. 

Being a journalist in the old mold, which is a consequence of my innate sense of amused detachment about the human race, I have steadfastly avoided assuming the role of a perpetually enraged activist of the kind one sees crowding and fouling up the world of Indian broadcast news. Swollen, throbbing veins on their necks and foreheads are the only thing that one sees these days on any news show in India. Stabbing the viewer in the chest with their index finger and hectoring them is a requirement to be a news anchor in India.

Everyone claims the moral and cultural high ground on all sides of the debate every night on these shows. Nincompoop spokespersons from various political parties shout their positions on show after show without resolving anything at all but unleashing even more biliousness and recrimination. Some people loftily call it a democracy in progress when what it really is a collection of blowhards with bad digestive tracts.

There is no leader or public figure of stature who can rise above the fray and tell a privileged section of the country engaging in a useless gabfest to shut the fuck up and do something more constructive. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is at the helm as the entire country’s leader, hides behind sullen and surly silences rather than using his powerful pulpit to tell bickering buffoons to lay off. Instead he whines that there is a conspiracy to destabilize his government despite still being a prime minister who continues to enjoy an insane level of uncritical adulatory among a fairly large section of the people.

I can easily do a heavy piece full of historical references with a gravitas-laden phraseology to explain what is going on India. I am not doing it because what is going on in India is undeserving of such attention. Those who do not tire of pointing out India’s civilizational greatness over five millennia curiously omit the fact that dissent and contrarianism have been the bedrock of it. One looks at the rise of a weird brand of anti-intellectualism that is debasing the popular discourse and wonders whether any of them are even remotely aware of the profoundly scholarly works of Bhartrhari (450 and 510 C.E.) or the Cārvāka materialist school (roughly 500 B.C.E) or Kumarila Bhatta (730 C.E.)

It is a pointless exercise to intervene and opine.

Writing to purge conceit but only adding to it

Poetry is the potion of the self-absorbed. (I said this, just now. So stop wondering who said it.) That being the case, I have been on that potion for the past four decades. Over the years one has written a great deal of poetry in a combination of Hindi-Urdu and some in my native Gujarati, drawing on a limited vocabulary. My command over these languages is more inferred than studied. I have picked up along the way.

This weekend, quite on an impulse I have decided to publish my poetry, known in Urdu by the genre’s more popular name, Ghazal. I have lost count how many I might have written because many of them have disappeared on scraps of paper over the decades. It would be safe to say I have written a few hundred. I plan to publish 60.

I have said this before about my poetry. When I am good I am world-class and when I am not, I am pitiable. I am mostly good. I have also said this before that I do not identify at all with what I write. It is a sovereign creation that does not reflect my state of mind. I am not an emotional writer. Everything I write is mechanical in my mind.

Take for instance this one that I wrote on May 17, 2013. It represents nothing that was unfolding in my life. Perhaps the last verse about penury has some real-life connection but then that is perpetual.

काफिले की रवानगी का इंतज़ार

कोई बेचैन तो कोई बेक़रार

(Awaiting the departure of the caravan

Some restless, some eager)

इधर माशूक की बेसब्री

उधर विसाल-ए-यार

(Here, an impatient lover

There, one tormented by separation)

सूरज है अपने उरूज़ पर

तंग है साया-ए-दीवार

(The sun is at its peak

The wall’s shadow is tight)

मैं एक भटकता फ़क़ीर

न कोई इस पार न उस पार

(I an aimless vagabond

None for me here, none there)

जेबों में हवा की हुकूमत

पर मुठ्ठी में आसमान गिरफ्तार

Empty pockets reign supreme

And yet a fistful of sky

***

The intention to publish a book of poetry is not necessarily to sell it and make some money, although I am not married to penury. If someone does want to buy, I am not going to stand in the way. If someone somewhere feels stirred up or motivated on reading any of what I have written, then I suppose it is a good thing. Otherwise as the title of the book suggests—“Main hi tamasha aur main hi tamashai—“I am the spectacle and I am the spectator.”

One writes to purge oneself of conceit but that only adds to it. So there.

Two untitled works

These two paintings have been done about two and half months apart, the one on top being done this morning and the one below on December 6, last year. There is a distinct visual affinity. Both are untitled, although I had provisionally called the one below Klimt because it was inspired by the Austrian master Gustav Klimt’s iconic ‘The Kiss’. That’s all for today.

Edvard Munch, The Scream and us today

The Scream by Edvard Munch (All Images: Screenshots from www.edvardmunch.org)

With all the shouting and screaming there in India and here in America I have been trying to reconcile all the noise with my current obsession with Edvard Munch (1863-1944—Munch pronounced Munk with a slight oo). That could be primarily because this late 19th century and early 20 century Norwegian master has been immortalized by a single piece of a beguiling painting called ‘The Scream’, circa 1893.

The Scream is widely seen as iconic at the same level as Mona Lisa by the preternatural genius Leonardo da Vinci. Of course, there is so much more to Munch’s artistic life than just the screaming man walking alone a boardwalk in apparent terror of what he sees and hears. I strongly recommend you visit www.edwardmunch.org and go through close to 200 of his works, which represent but a percentage of his total his output. The website points out that during a career spanning several decades Munch produced “a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copperplates and photographs.”

The Scream is just one work among an astonishing variety of paintings and other art that Munch produced. In reading up about him I have come to know that unlike many masters Munch is particularly well-regarded for capturing what is broadly called “the human condition”, an expression I have come to dislike but does justice here. I look at his works as spell-binding representation of human moods and states of minds.

Much of what we people feel these days—anxiety, anger, anguish, melancholy, distress, jealousy—has been painted by him. In a comment that perhaps sums up his philosophy as an artist Munch once said, “No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love."

Speaking of human moods, have a look at this 1894 work appropriately titled ‘Melancholy’.

Melancholy by Munch (1894)

Or this, titled Jealousy from 1895.

Jealousy by Munch (1895)

Or this, titled ‘Anxiety’

‘Anxiety’ by Munch

Munch also painted many upbeat works. Among them is this much celebrated ‘The Dance of Life’ (1899). But even in that the faces have that bewildered uncertainty on their faces.

This 1896 work titled ‘Girl on the beach’, while seemingly optimistic, also creates a sense of intrigue about what Munch’s girl might be thinking.

‘Girl on the beach’ by Munch (1896)

All that said, I find it remarkable that Munch has captured so many human moods without trying to be showy about his astonishing craftsmanship. If you are interested to know a little more, I recommend this video.