Meditations – 5

Meditations – 5

It is imperative you rip your shirt in two

at least once, during a date. There are glands

that require regular secretion, remember to secrete

in public places. The men sipping furtively

from brown paper bags can be safely punched

in the paunch. Office-goers must be kneed

in the groin for maximum effect. Do not litter

your mouth, always spit. Masturbate from rooftops, 

pretend you are a pigeon. Scrawl your name inside

lifts, it is good to be remembered. 

Always pause when crossing the road, 

let the man who does not

run you over feel better about himself

if just for a day. 

A poem

I

 

We have learned to align ourselves

to the gaps between his fingers. We brace

ourselves against the terrible pressure 

of his wanton grasping. No one said freedom 

was going to be easy. We thank the Maker 

for Her thoughtful design that allows for spaces 

even in the most constricted of fists. 

Later, when we are wriggled out, when he has 

unfurled his sky above us and broken the earth 

between his toes, we turn back to the mud, the still

naked soil, the clumps of defiant green that have

escaped his uprooting. 

 

II

 

                         Once, we remembered trees. 

But then, a day came with a terrible gale. (He sneezed.)

The trees dug in, roots reached into the roiling

centre of the earth. We did what we could. We hugged

the trees upright when they bent before him. 

We tied ourselves to their shredded barks, our flesh

shields ripped and twisted by his cancerous

breath. We stuck leaves back to drooping limbs, 

where his drones worked their routine genocides. 

One morning, he darkened his brow and that was that. 

The trees died without his light. They shattered

themselves into twigs at our feet. He punched

mines into our vacant mountains, spat bile into 

our rivers. He built anthills in the sand for us. 

Now, his nose hangs like a falling cliff above us.

His thousand eyes watch our furtive steps

like baleful stars.

 

III

                    By night, we gather what is left. 

Decade over decade, we stitch twig to twiglet, 

leaf to limb, flesh to bark, blood to sap. 

A night will fall, we know (oh, we know)

when there will be no more twigs to bind. 

When this tree of trees, this totem of a thousand

deaths, this spear of destiny: we will raise it high 

higher than his shoulders where his brooding drones perch

higher than the dark oily borders of his backswept hairline,

higher than the floating eyes of his cameras

higher than the reach of his grasping fingers

higher and higher until it breaks the sky

and all comes tumbling down. This time when he is pinned

and writhing under the debris, we will not

shift the rubble. This time when the sky

falls apart, we will not put it together again. 

We will allow no heaven to stand above us

to mark us one people, one nation. 

It is too late but whatever for NaPoWriMo #4

Jaratkaru

I

Buildings huddled around him, their pink and orange fronts
streaked black by wind. Rubble and refuse strewed themselves
at the edges of the road, inspected by a herd of cows.
The hollow insides of rickshaws, the cars that gathered rust,
a boundary wall that sprouted moss, the blind eyes
of street lamps, the vacant vigilant watchman’s chair
by the gate, the groan, the creak and the slow anguish
of the ascending lift, the empty nameplate on the door,
he knew them all. Inside, curtains sulk in place. The room
fills itself with his smelly socks. He checks the feverish blinking
lights on his modem and nods, satisfied. There is water
in a glass. Black dots float in its depths. He drains it.
He ponders drying shirts on lines outside, like empty men
arms outstretched over the hole of the world below.
A wind arises, a shirt struggles, its hands waving at him
like a plea he cannot bring himself to answer.

(NOTE: Go here to learn of Jaratkaru. If there was one guy who was totally pushed into an arranged marriage, it was him.)

They switched the fort lights off so I wrote something

In my travel through Rajasthan, I have written no fiction or poetry. Only little tidbits here and there about the places I’ve passed by which I may post up here with pics later when I’m back in Bombay. Today, I broke that streak and managed to write something sipping chai in a rooftop restaurant watching the lights go out over Meherangarh fort in Jodhpur. And it’s a ghazal. Not a very good one but an improvement over my previous attempt. So here it is, uncut and deferred live:

In my room

Some days I forget to sit while in my room.
There is no vantage like the one in my room.

There are no crows, just caws. Twigs live to snap.
Sound is an illegal immigrant in my room.

I found a backlit fort outside my window once.
Its cannons couldn’t outstare the bulb in my room.

Byzantium fell. There will be no other.
There will always be a postcard in my room.

They speak of mothers and lands carved from them.
I send them money over PayPal in my room.

God looked out of a bole in a tree. He smiled.
An idol crumbles behind a basil in my room.

How will we live, if we must, without a beloved?
I am never cold with thirteen rajais in my room.

I have known the flash of scimitars only in a game.
I have no need to stay circumcised in my room.

My woofer, you are. The bass that grounds my song of songs.
The silence of things unroots me in my room.

“K, the world rolls away. Continents carve themselves.
Can you see the faint zigzagging crack in your room?”

Post-lit-fest stuff and some other things

I write this in a cold hotel room in Bikaner, groggied out from being awoken early in the morning to report for an interrogation by some local police-type about my reasons for being. Also, after four days of black coffees, donuts/croissants, sleeplessness, drinkage and Jaipur streetside snacking,  my stomach has collapsed into itself and decided any food I drop down will be cast out with much sound and fury in streams of brown lava.

While this lit fest hangover is a pain, the fest itself was fun. I didn’t meet any authors, no. But the sessions were good. Those I particularly enjoyed, in no particular order:

Bulle Shah: A session on the poetry of Bulle Shah and the ongoing English translation of it.  Ali Sethi and Madan Gopal Singh performed extracts, whose English translation was presented by Christopher Shackle. Madan Gopal Singh also went into the history and the performative aspects of Bulle Shah’s work.

Reporting the Occupation: Perhaps the best conducted session that I attended, it featured three different takes on the reporting of war and the process of occupation by Jon Lee Anderson, David Finkle and Rory Stewart. Particularly interesting was the diametrically opposite points of view from Rory who had walked through Afghanistan studying the effects of the American occupation on its people and David who had traveled with a US Army convoy in Iraq.

Out of West: While not a particularly informative session, I got to see a muchly irritated Orhan Pamuk getting crabby about the moderator Rana Dasgupta’s take on the title of the session. Also had Rana Dasgupta defining globalization for the panel and the audience.

1857: Mahmood Farooqui and Mrinal Pande both read extracts from their respective works on the revolt. Mrinal Pande’s work was a translation of the account of a couple of Brahmins from Vasai who traveled through Kanpur to Jhansi, before passing through Lucknow, Awadh while the war was being waged, while Mahmood Farooqui’s work featured the many perspectives on the revolt in Delhi from merchants, commoners, police, sepoys, etc. The extracts were informative, but the discussion wasn’t.

Chauraha: Poetry readings by Arundhati Subramanian, Jatin Das, Meena Kandasamy and Karthika Nair. There was a world of a difference between the work of Jatin Das or Kartika Nair and that of Arundhati Subramanian or Meena Kandasamy. While I found some of Jatin Das’ short abstract works interesting, Karthika Nair’s long pieces were dull. Arundhati Subramanian proved the best performer of the lot. When she threw the floor open for question time, the audience decided it’s better if the time was spent in more poems. Meena Kandasamy’s machinegun edgy reading of her poems was good also.

Readings from Coetzee: I’d never read Coetzee before this session. It was conducted after lunch and was packed with people, many of who sat their way in the venue through lunch time. In fact, a whole half hour before the session was due to begin, there was no free spot to be found anywhere under the canopy of Vodafone Front Lawns. The session itself featured a short introduction of sorts by Patrick French followed by a 45 minute reading of a short story by Coetzee about an old woman in Mexico who kept a lot of wild cats. It was a good reading. And one where there was not a whisper in the audience (at least around me, I was sitting in the second row) for the whole duration of the story. Though I did spot a couple of photographers near the stage who seemed to find William Dalrymple, who was sitting on the steps leading up to the stage, very funny.

Kasmir Kashmir: Because Swapan Dasgupta trolled Basharat Peer on his calling the stone throwing in Kasmir an intefada.

Veda, Ends of Knowledge: Very awesome session by Roberto Calasso done with Devdutt Pattanaik. The discussion started with a definition of tapas and then veered from a bit about the early Rig Veda to the Brahmanas, about the form of ritual and its many connotations, and also gave me a new take on the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Very awesome, yes.

Narcopolis: Jeet Thayil read an extract from his yet-to-be-published novel, Narcopolis and C P Surendran, from his published novel, Lost and Found. Jeet’s extract peeved a few folk, with its repetitions of chooth and slurs against certain regions in India. Which in turn peeved C P Surendran who seemed particularly irritated that day (unless he is always like that), so he spent his time talking back at the audience about the latent absurdity of modern urban life and the freedom of writers, etc. Fun, it was.

I didn’t go to the fest for the fifth day, having drank my way into the night of the 24th discussing lit theory and such like with a pack of other writerly people. I purchased a whole of four books in the fest, of which I got one signed. C P Surendran never showed up in the signing tent to do any signing after his session, which left me and another girl there very disappointed. The fest was a lot of fun, just to wander around in. I spent a lot of time skipping sessions and walking randomly from one place to another, drinking free chai served in little mud cups, fucking my digestion up with 30 rs. espressos, etc. Apart from the first two days of the fest, I didn’t stay back for the performances scheduled after 6. They were usually too crowded and too packed with random drunk folk.

Overall, the fest was a great experience. I met a lot of interesting folk, slept little, drank much, and found a renewed sense of purpose in writing. So it has been all good, yes. Minus the stomach trouble that continues to plague me. For now, I am off to faff around Rajasthan for a bit before heading back home. Of which I may write later, or not.

Somedays you write something and wonder

And some days you don’t. This has been one of those days. I found an old, old, positively ancient draft of a piece of writing that I hadn’t completed. In the spirit of always finishing what one starts (a sound spirit for the start of a new year, no?), I spent the rest of my day writing it up. It follows from a question I had of how complete can a fantasy world be. How much can/should I flesh a world out so it is visible as a world-in-itself to a reader? And so forth. As an experiment (because I like taking up things that lie way beyond my meager talents), I ended up writing this piece. Enjoy, please!

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How a Panarch died with fifteen and a half pikes

It was on the morning of the 5th of Lacost that the Panarch[91] of Grouton[8] found a fully formed army of Slagosian raiders[0.3] outside his broom closet. Now while creatures made of lesser metal[0] would have felt an unhinging terror come piling down over their noggins[1] like the ubiquitous rain of sharp objects in any construction site[-1], roaring Rutger (so was the Panarch of Grouton named on the eve of his nativity a full fifty-seven winters past, in a hut whose thatch had been mortgaged for his naming[2] by a doting new-made mother and a father who, on hearing it was a boy, had promptly consumed the greater part of two liters of undistilled Kragoth bile[4]) contemplated  the fiddly bits at the ends of his shoelaces for a full minute[6] before girding his pajamas firmly about his sagging belly. He charged[27] with a snarl that paused the few dogwalkers[12] on the promenade outside his window for a moment, long enough to evoke long-suppressed genetic[32] memories of the days of Groutonian yore[7] when men were men enough to bang a drum[78] and go marching off to remote quarters[11] in search of luckless maidens[31] and high adventure[54]. Unfortunately, Slagosian raiders were trained[65] to avoid sinking into any form of maudlin reverie[112] in the middle of a conquest[111] and thus ended the reign of Rutger Variach-Thistlerooy, last Panarch of Grouton, with  fifteen and a half[133] pikes[23] firmly buried in his belly.

[-1] – The probability of having a sharp object fall down on ones noggin has been statistically computed to be equivalent to that of getting buggered by a narwhal in a freshwater lake. The only exceptions to this rule are those with a magnetic personality, for whom the probability is that of getting buggered by a narwhal in the open sea. It should be noted that these numbers were derived by the Fishers Of Men sect of the University of Icanhaza’s Cat-Burglar cult.

[0] – A view widely held in the more conservative segments of the Doodler’s Quarter, namely the Tangible Society of Droopos Grath (also known as the Tangibilists), that the womb is nought but a furnace in which is forged the substance of man (or woman as it were) by a team of little imp blacksmiths (who are said to reside in the womb proper and not in the cervix or the spleen as is often asserted by such addle-brained groups who wouldn’t know to distinguish between a spleen and a spork like the Coven of the Ineffable and Salazar Slouzo’s school of Saussieres) in a roughly eight-month long process that generally involves the design and approval phase wherein the new sentient is approved by a panel of lesser divinities who simultaneously reside in a collective womb-space (a nexus-region where all wombs converge, refer to the seminal text on womb-space by the celebrated Juanita Sh’Rujah, “The Sexist Nexus”) followed by the smelting of base matter, integrity of design,  the forging of parts and finally the assemblage of parts before final handover with any special requests from the parents regarding birth marks, nose lengths, etc. which are tackled on a case-by-case basis. Thus, it is presumed that all creatures are metallic in a sense and also sheds a light on why those with an inherently magnetic personality attract so many followers. The epithet ‘lesser metal’ is a pointed barb at not just a deficiency in the character of the signified but also on his parentage. The usage of this epithet is considered a serious offence in the Doodler’s Quarter. It is only ever used lightly in the Mentalist’s Quarter as a sort of pun on ‘lesser mental’, but then no one really cares about the Mentalists.

[0.3] – Slagosian raiders, also called the avant-raiders for their revolutionary raids. Garbed in a simple unadorned white tunic, a hard canvas cap pulled sideways, chainmail leggings terminating just below the knee, and shoes made of soft canvas, they are unique for their utter disregard for jangling metal armour and steaming black warhorses (something dear to raiders of yore who prided themselves on the thunder of their party’s hooves). The usual Slagosian raid involves all members of the raiding party casually shifting into position from myriad corners (a Slagosian raider’s compass for corners is acute enow that he can find one to slink from in an open desert) at the appointed time and then proceeding with the raid (or as the Slagosians put it, “brungin da ruckus”) after a round of nods and complicated handshakes. The only nod to traditional raid etiquette is their use of steel pikes, usually sawed down to quarter length or more so they could be sheathed in their belts and covered by their tunics.

[1] – Psychothaumists have identified the noggin as the part of the psyche that is still reptilian in its general behaviour. They have pinpointed its location as somewhere in the third epicircle in the anterior system of the brain. This psychothaumist belief, while widely accepted by purists and critics all over the realm, has been disputed by the Tangibilists as being excessively symbolic and sorely lacking in imps.

[2] – The thatch was gold leaf.

[4] – Kragoth bile is usually extracted from the dormant forms of nesting Kragoth matriarchs in their lava caves. It is considered to be dangerous though the process merely involves lulling the matriarch to sleep with a magic flute, ripping open her liver, fighting off a horde (or hordes) of bileguards equipped with electric lances and lava hands, and gathering the bile in tiny paper bags (10cmX10cm). Then one has to fire up one’s jetpack, count to 10 (or 5 or 2 as it may be) and wait for the matriarch to sneeze one out of the caves.

[6] – Aglets. The meditation of aglets was one of many practices of the Holy Order of Dullgazers who were forever embroiled in a spiritual debate/conflict with the Holy Order of Blinggazers who held the meditation of the painted toe-nail to be vastly superior, and had subsequently passed an anathema on shoes.

[7] – The original Groutonian yore was passed from generation to generation on banana leaves. Due to the scarcity of banana plantations in and around the marshlands that make up Grouton, it was briefer than most contemporary yores, standing at about 31 lines or so with the last line ending in a semi-colon. With the evolution of better recording devices and access to other mythohistorical lores in the realm, a group of muckbards (so called because of their penchant to attire themselves in, what they considered, traditional Groutonian garb: a frogskin robe that stank of iodine, dragonfly-wing cowls, reed shirts, reed pants and bamboo slippers. All ritually covered in swamp goo.) started creating longer derivative works from the original yore and later derivative works deriving from their own derivative works and so on. While a vast majority of Groutonians prefer the brevity of the original yore, the muckbards are allowed a corner in all festivals for their week-long performances and recitations.

[8] – Grouton was classically considered to be the land evolution forgot. It soon caught up with the rest of the realm under the millenium-long efforts of the Mad Lich Zauba who sought an army of frog-men to conquer the twin lush lands of Slagos and Slagia. Legend maintains the Mad Lich had been banished from these lands after unfortunate incidents involving metal rails and dead unicorns. In Grouton, he succeeded in advancing the evolution of a race of frog-men whom he fondly named Gooks. It was around this time, however, that Slagian scientists discovered the skin-preserving benefits of frogskin whereupon the Slagian Queen with a battalion of her Valkyries marched on the swamp lands and exterminated the Gooks. Of Zauba, there is no other mention in any history of the realm. The Slagians established an outpost to harvest what amphibians could be found in the swamp. It is this outpost that would later evolve into the squat, muggy, fly-ridden piece of an exotic tourist destination, Grouton.

[11] – The Saragassan Wastelands constituted of the following principalities: Grouton, the twin lush lands of Slagos and Slagia, Icanhaza, the AnarchoSyndicalist State of HOLE (a union formed out of four separate states, named Holback, Orange, Lumoschiffa, and Erszebetia), the bird city of Twola, the time-warped principality of Kaal, the Confederacy of Right-Minded People of the West (originally a set of collectives that encroached upon the barren wastelands of the other principalities claiming their labour on these lands translated to their ownership of it, they were granted full nation-rights after a long armed struggle against wolves, one-eyed vultures and other predators that plagued the wastelands. ) the 386 communes in the sprawling forest of Dandaka, and the numbered provinces of the merchant barbarians. At the heart of the Wastelands lay the vast chaotic tracts of the Central Wastes where kingdoms built themselves out of nomadic villages and fell to other kingdoms similarly risen. The remote quarters were the borders of the known principalities around the Central Wastes where a border force, maintained unitedly by all known principalities, kept the mad winds (as the genteel folk of the known principalities termed it) of the Wastes away from civilization. Oftentimes, the bastard born or the generally luckless or idle types in any part of the civilized world would take it upon themselves (or have it thrust upon them) to go marching into the unknown tracts of the Wastes for fame-and-fortune. It was generally assumed they had achieved it seeing how none of them ever returned.

[12] – By Groutonian law, any species that was leashable and walkable was considered a ‘dog’. On any day of the week, the promenades of Grouton were rife with dragonslugs, megatoads, alleygators, spider-monkeys and more, all obediently followed by their two (or three or four) legged masters, all out for a breath of tepid air.

[23] – While the civilized world had progressed to more potent and more benign forms of weaponry like electric lances, thaumophores, lightblenders, MOM’s, etc., there were still raid parties in Slagos that favored the old-school pike. It was a matter of honour for them to wield a two-foot-long length of steel that tapered to a glint of a point at the end. It was considered good form to have one’s name usually prefaced by a “Lil” or a “Big” (as the case may be) printed along the length of one’s pike.

[27] – There are few sights more impressive in the civilized world than a well-executed Groutonian charge. Hailed by military minds all over as the most efficient and elegant use of shock-and-awe tactics, the Groutonian charge has been known to leave whole armies stupefied. The most successful charge was seen in the Battle of Three Doors wherein the heavily outnumbered Groutonian Light Brigade charged out and away with such flourish, with such panache, that the Erszebetian Magenta Guard remained stunned for three weeks; a vast majority of them dying on their feet of thirst.

[31] – Refer to 11. Luckless maidens are to be distinguished from down-on-their-luck maidens as the latter usually congregated in black alleys with painted faces and bad teeth.

[32] – In an attempt to optimize co-operative behavior among the Gooks, the Mad Lich Zauba (refer to 8 ) designed the genete which appeared to be little more than a dull grey slab with a smooth black face. However, on passing one’s hand over it, its black face would come alive and display a whole range of nifty features like a diary, a calendar, a device to capture one’s visual/aural/psychic feedback and retain it for all time. Considering every genete was connected to every other genete, every Gook could communicate efficiently and speedily with every other Gook in a manner far superior to the usual exchanges of croaking and counter-croaking. Of course, their superior communication did not protect them from the vorpal blades of the Slagian Valkyries. On exterminating the gooks, the Slagians decided to keep the genetes and use them for their own purposes. Down the ages, the genetes hold the collective memory of all Groutonians. So it is that in moments of great import, they expressed themselves through the evocation of representations (visual, aural or verbal) stored in their genetic memory.

[54] – Adventure was the sole pursuit of a vast majority of the unemployable mass of the civilized world (anticipation of their next dinner/fix was the sole pursuit of the rest of that mass). Even among them, a lot favoured what were collectively termed as ‘low adventure’ sports, like waspfighting, tunnelsurfing, rack-the-infidel (restricted to those in holy orders), journalism, cloudbreaking, the Iron Lung Slam, etc. High adventure on the other hand was considered tedious and “too much of a drag”. It usually consisted of one or more of the following: dragonbaiting, witch-curse-search or witch-curse-removal or witch-curse-assistance or witch-curse-accident (similarly, seer-curse-removal, etc.), stablecleaning, god(dess)-seduction (usually followed by witch-curse-removal, etc), philosophy, alien-hive-genocide, etc.

[65] – That is to say, they were given a plain white tunic, chainmail leggings terminating just below the knee, a cap turned sideways, shoes made of soft canvas and a lesson in acceptable Slagosian raider slang with a beginner-level course in rims.

[78] – In the swamplands of old Grouton, string instruments were discouraged for one never knew when the string one is plucking will let out a hiss and bite off a finger tip. Wind instruments were likewise discouraged for fear of invoking whatever ancient Swamp God and his minions lay buried under the city. So it was that those musically inclined among the  Groutonians turned to the drum and a primitive repetitive chant for accompaniment. Before long, drums had evolved from a couple of rocks being banged together to a variety of drums like an elaborate arrangement of specially carved rocks controlled by the water level in a set of coloured pipes, the skin of an alleygator stretched over a hollow barrel and rubbed with its thyroid bone (known to produce a most bewildering range of bass notes), Slagosian raider skins stretched over bone drums (any skin would suffice, but Slagosian raider corpses were easier to come by), and more. Drums formed an integral part of all social and private occasions in a Groutonian’s life.

[91] – The Panarchate of Grouton was a recent development in the history of the realm. About 471 years in the past, the people of Grouton overthrew the Slagian duke and established the Social Democratic Republic of Grouton. The constitution of the Republic was drafted in three days and elections carried out on the fourth. On the eve of the President’s coronation, the deposed duke, with the assistance of the Groutonian army, successfully enacted a coup against the now-stillborn republic. To appease the people of Grouton, he pronounced himself the first Panarch of the independent Panarchate of Grouton. The people were content in knowing they were now an independent people like the rest of the civilized world. The deliveries of frogskin and other amphibianskins to Slagia continued as they were the primary exports of Grouton. Indeed, even the currency of Grouton continued to be the Slagian Frook because no one could be bothered to come up with a new design. So it went.

[111] – Or, as the Slagosian raiders liked to call it, a dryveby.

[112] – Maudlin reverie was considered indispensable to the mental health of all civilized people by The Society of The Reminiscers of Things Past. The society was known to boast kings, panarchs, anarchs, fiefs, supreme commanders, holy supreme commanders, grand emperor of now and hereafter, holy grand emperor of all nows anytime (a title held by the ruler of Kaal), and other such dignitaries. A counter movement slowly grew out of the slums and ghettoes of Slagos (which also contributed to its vast armies of raiders) whose subversive reaction to the Reverie involved them yelling “STOP” at the reverers, followed by “IT’S HAMMA TIME”. Slagosian raiders, being routinely exposed to these exhortations, had developed an immunity to all forms of maudlin reverie.

[133] – Statistically, it is known that in any school of sixteen fishes, there will be one who will only put in a half-hearted attempt at all school activities. This is the fish you will always catch. So it is maintained by the Fishers Of Men sect of the University of Icanhaza’s Cat-Burglar cult.

I won something

I won money. Amidst the usual deletable junk in my inbox, I found an email from the good people at Prakriti Foundation yesterday. They informed me that my poem, Proserpine, had been selected for second prize in their competition which translates to 7500 bucks! Which had me like this for a fair amount of time:

Replace Bacon with Second Prize and that was me. Winning things is awesome. Though the best things you will ever win will be Consolation Prizes. Because you’re sitting in your corner all drained out and empty ‘cos the top prizes have been given out and you got nothing. So there you are, wet-kerchiefed, sodden-eyed, cold-sweaty-palmed, etc., and they announce a consolation prize for you. It’s a whiff of fresh air in a public loo, a litter of cats in a Schrodinger box, and other such unexpectedly nice things.

In other news, I was in Pune for the past two days getting massively boozed out, and returned this morning. There are pictures and there are stories. But both will have to wait till I’m sufficiently rested and the return of my perfidious brother who took advantage of my early-morning (drinkaged) grogginess and stole my camera. Now since I am liking this word ‘perfidious’ so much, I present you a jhalak of its possible usage:

It is morning
for us perfidious drunks
with its steps slowly backing
from our glare-eyed shamble

Riffing off this earlier poem which I was liking a lot in my (drinkaged) happiness last night.

An act of censorship and a poem

This is causing a buzz of sorts on Facebook. An innocuous anti-Modi remark printed in a select few copies of a book of poems by Aqaal Shatir has “brought the ire” (as the article puts it) of the Gujarat Urdu Sahitya Academy who funded the publication. Now they want their money back. Here’s the offending line:

Ho Narendra Modi ka ke iqtedar men aate hi us ne is riyasat se Urdu ka safaya hi kar diya, Modi ne sirf itne par he iktefa nahin kiya, balke 2002 men ek soche-samjhe mansoobe ke tehat poore Gujarat men firqawaranh fasadat aur haiveaniyat ka wo nanga khel khela ke poori insaniyat he sharmsar ho kar rah gaee. Har taraf loot mar, qatl o gharatgiri, ismat dari, aatish zani aur aqliyati nasl kushi jaisi sangeen wardaar karva kar oos ne poore mulk men khauf o hirass paid kar diya tha

Which translates to:

May good come the way of Narendra Modi, who has finished off Urdu in this State on coming to power and did not stop at that, but under a well thought-out plan, (he) played such a naked game of communal riots and barbarism which put to shame the entire humanity. By spreading terrific incidents of loot, murder and mayhem, rape, burning and genocide of the minority community, he created an atmosphere of terror in the whole country.

The book was released two years ago, but the piece in question came to the Academy’s attention only recently. After Shatir filed “a slew of RTI queries” questioning the working of the Academy.

A facebook group “May good come the way of Narendra Modi” was formed to protest this feebly (and dubious) patriotic (it says nice things about the leader or it gets the hose again) attempt at censorship. Go join. The aim of the group is, in the words of Annie Zaidi, “to spread that sentence further as far as we can”. I decided to sample the English translation and see what I could come up with. The first draft of my efforts is this:

In 2002, Marenda Nodri finished Urdu off in his state
In 0202, Nodendra Mari came to power and did not stop
In 0022, Nodendi Marra thought out a plan under a well
In 2020, Narendi Modra played a naked game
In 2002, Modendi Narra rioted communally
In 0202, Modendra Nari was barbaric
In 0022, Nadendra Mori shamed an entire humanity
In 2020, Nadendri Mora spread terrific incidents
In 2002, Morendri Nada looted, murdered, mayhemed
In 0202, Narendri Moda raped, burned, genocided
In 0022, Marendri Noda minoritised a community
In 2020, Marendra Nori created an atmosphere
In 2002, Narendra Modi terrorised a whole country.

The aim was to point out the absurdity of censoring any reference to Modi. That any act of censorship will only spawn a multitude of alternative ways of referring to the original.

[Edit on Thursday, the 23rd of December]:

May good come the way of

Marenda Nodri, who finished Urdu off in his state
Nodendra Mari, who came to power and did not stop
Nodendi Marra, who thought out a plan under a well
Narendi Modra, who played a naked game
Modendi Narra, who rioted communally
Modendra Nari, who was barbaric
Nadendra Mori, who shamed an entire humanity
Nadendri Mora, who spread terrific incidents
Morendri Nada, who looted, murdered, mayhemed
Narendri Moda, who raped, burned, genocided
Marendri Noda, who minoritised a community
Marendra Nori, who created an atmosphere
Narendra Modi, who terrorised a whole country.

Cross-posted from an earlier time: Two Movies

Movie: Ran (1984)

 

Kurosawa takes Lear and strips off all the tragedy, leaving nothing more than a bleak, hopeless shell. His Lear is a Hidetora Ichimonji, a warlord who had united all lands under him by the sword and burning down all he couldn’t conquer. Not exactly the doting while at the same time crotchety  grandfatherly chap Shakespeare had in mind. He has no daughters, but 3 sons (which makes the whole betrayal thing easy to digest. After watching the sole female lead inRan, I doubt a movie with three daughters would’ve been little more than sly wheedling, pent-up rage, pretty kimonos and sliding screen doors. And blood-drenched wakizashis. Of course.) Taro is Goneril, Jiro is Regan and Saburo is Cordelia. The Fool Kyoami, is the Fool. Then there is Tango, who is the Earl of Kent. (Now go read Lear and fill in the blanks. That may not give you the movie but it’ll afford some amusement to have the King of France court a samurai Saburo…Holy wow, Shakespeare-Kurosawa crossover yaoi!)

Ahem. Highlights:

1. There are few movies out there that look more picturesque than Ran. From the vividly green grass to flowing red and yellow banners crossing each other across a battlefield to a longshot of a shaken Hidetora walking down the steps  of a burning castle flanked by armies with their arrows trained at him, this is a movie of memorable stills. Almost the whole movie is shot with longshots, with the characters little more than rats moving across a scene.
2. I remember Kurosawa’s war sequences from Kagemusha which were pretty grand. But Ran beats that by a fair count with the attack on Third Castle by the combined forces of Taro and Jiro. What makes it absurd is that it’s actually pretty. All those multicoloured banners, all that fire, the cosy wooden quarters of the castle and pretty doll women in kimonos stabbing each other or getting shot. There is no battle sound, only Toru Takemitsu’s soundtrack for a large part of the scene.  There is a fair amount of gore too with bleeding stumps, arrows in eyes, horse hooves trampling folk, human arrowcushions snailing for a while and dropping dead and on one occasion, a pile of dead bodies by a gate where you can see one of the dead guys close his eyes after a while.
3. The movie is set during the Sengoku period in Japan, when the land was cut up between warlords who spent their lives fighting each other, which lends it that edge Lear never had. Ichimonji is no benevolent king who wants to spend his last days in peace, he is a tyrant too tired to fight. The plotting, the stratagems, the backstabbing and murders in the movie grow more and more desperate, as if the violence is feeding itself and Ichimonji sinks lower and lower from shock to senility.
4. The only innocents in the movie are perennial victims, the Buddhist brother and sister duo, the blind Tsurumaru and Sue,  who were orphaned by Ichimonji and later caught in the crossfire of the war of the brothers. They are also the only religious characters in the movie, followers of the Amida Buddha. Kurosawa points out the helplessness of the innocent and the weak in the face of those more powerful than them, whenever he can. So you have Ichimonji berating Sue for not hating him for ruining her life, and later calling for a whole village to be burnt to the ground because they wouldn’t supply him with food and shelter. The movie ends with a shot  of  Tsurumaru abandoned on the edge of a fort against a red evening, with a portrait of the Amida Buddha.

Overall, Ran is by far, the best medieval movie I’ve seen. The next one I want to catch is Polanski’s Macbeth which I hear was made after the Manson murders though that’ll have to wait till after I’m done with Val Lewton and Mario Bava.

Movie: The Body Snatcher (1945)

On a whim, I decided I’m going to catch some old-school thrillers and it can’t get more thrilling than watching Boris Karloff’s evil grin, can it?

The movie is based on a R L Stevenson short story of the same name. The year is 1831, the place Edinburgh. The movie opens with a blind girl singing “When ye gone awa, Jamie” (at least that’s what it’s called in the movie later) and then we see a graveyard where an old woman and a young medical student try to speak like Scotspeople. Throughout the movie, there’s a sprinkling of “lass”, “bonny”, etc. in dialogue to keep reminding us where it’s all happening. Any way, the theme is something along the lines of: How far should medical science be allowed to go? Is it moral to set any boundaries on a science whose advancement could lead to the betterment of everyone? (The kind of shit they shout at each other on ‘Big Fight’ or that other show with B Dutt) The lead characters are a Doctor “Toddy” MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) who runs a medical school which needs a constant supply of dead bodies to dissect for research, his assistant Fettes (Russell Wade) who is a bright-eyed kid who wants to be a doctor and help folk out without doing anything wrong/immoral/disgusting and the ever-gracious Cabman Grey (Boris Karloff) who is, as his title suggests, a cabman who likes to earn some extra pay with a side-job as graverobber.

The movie plays around the relationship between Dr. MacFarlane and Cabman Grey. Both Daniell and Karloff are excellent in their performances as the helpless doctor who feels stifled by the low, uncouth cabman and the spiteful cabman who finds that the only real pleasure left to him is to torment the doctor with remembrances of favours past. The movie follows the standard Faustian “deal-with-the-devil” (or “stare-into-the-abyss” for that matter) plot and ends with a storm. There are moments when the class difference between the Doctor and the Cabman factor in. The Cabman resents the upper classes for their privileges and prefers, and even seeks out, whatever dirty work needs to be done for them to continue their work. It is his secret joy that all the research and advancement in the Doctor’s school derive from corpses stolen (or worse) by him. Alternately, the Doctor is conflicted by his reliance on the Cabman to provide him the material to continue his work in the school. That such a ‘noble’ endeavour should require such base measures (base in the upper class Doctor’s eyes) is something the Doctor must live with, but he resents the Cabman for spelling it out for him every time they meet. Which is one way of looking at it, yea. Or we go with the more pleasant theory that everyone’s a nutjob wracked with guilt and shame and all that gooey stuff which makes them do crazy shit.

If you do watch the movie, watch it for Karloff who brings an air of evil to the relatively staid (in horror movie terms, really, graverobbery and murder aren’t exactly all that awful as say, werecreature or vampire or psycho slasher) Cabman.  Karloff manages to infuse every scene with a sinisterness, with a raised eyebrow, a grin or just a questioning ‘Oh?’, something for which Wise (the director) should also be given credit. Bela Lugosi has a bit part in this and there is a brilliant sequence in the middle where Karloff and Lugosi share a scene. But the best scenes here are those where the Cabman is fucking with the Doctor in the bar.

The whole movie is available on YouTube over 8 parts. Here‘s the first part.

More blogging will follow in this week to come.

Poems on Kritya

The fine people at Kritya have put some of my poems up. One of them is this NaPo poem on Aditi‘s handwriting. All available here for your viewing pleasure.