The Misfits (1961)

While Steve Jobs had his version of misfits who thought differently, thinking of an older conversation with a friend, made me come back to the idea of misfits and understand it differently, perhaps. He had described a certain set of professional set-up as dusty, lawless, territorial. All those epithets that come to our mind when we think of Wild West. I had agreed with him wholeheartedly, then. But then,

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Coetzee on The Misfits that I ran into while reading Inner Workings:

The misfits (1961) was put together by a notable set of creative people. The film is based on an original screenplay by Arthur Miller. It was directed by John Huston; and it starred Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in what turned out to be their last big roles. The plot is simple. A woman, Roslyn, visiting Reno, Nevada, for a quick divorce, gets friendly with a group of part-time cowboys and goes off with them into the desert on a jaunt to trap wild horses. There she discovers that the horses will end up not as riding mounts but as pet food. The discovery precipitates a breakdown of trust between her and the men, a breakdown that film patches over only in the most uneasy and unconvincing of ways.

Aside from the ending, the script is a strong one. Miller is operating at the tail end of a long literary tradition of reflecting on the closing of America's western frontier, and the effects of that closing on the American psyche. Huckleberry Finn, at the end of the book about him by Mark Twain, still had the recourse of lighting out for the territories so as to escape civilization (and Nevada, in the 1840s of Huck's childhood, was one of the territories in question).

Miller's cowboys, a century or so later, are trapped in the States with nowhere to go. One of them, Gaye (Clark Gable), has become a gigolo preying on divorcees. Another, Perce (Montgomery Clift) scrapes together a living as a rodeo performer. The third, Guido (Eli Wallach), exhibits the dark side of the male homosociality of the frontier, namely a vicious misogyny.

These are Miller's misfits, men who have either failed to make the transition to the modern world or are making that transition in an ignominious way. The three are presented with a rounded ness that is rare in cinema, the result of Miller's deft professional stagecraft.

But of course Miller's title has a second ironic meaning. If the cowboys are misfits in Eisenhower's America, the Nevada mustangs are even more deeply so. There used to ten of thousands of them; now they are pitiful troops up in the hills, barely worth being exploited. From being an embodiment of the freedom of the frontier, they have become anachronism, creatures with no useful role in mechanized civilization. It is their lot to be herded and hunted from the air; if they are not actually being shot from the air, that is only because the flesh would spoil before the horse-butcher could arrive with his refrigerated truck.

 It dispelled my notion of our transition to mechanized civilization and our precarious origins, evolution and our current belonging and perception towards it.

Coetzee on Naipaul

Why might one be drawn to read a collection of the book reviews from a writer who himself is an accomplished fiction writer? In Inner Workings, J.M.Coetzee analyzes and penetrates few of the literary work by others and through his own voice, gives detailed reviews, explain nuances of work from his, sometimes, detached lens of understanding. In an essay on V.S.Naipaul he explains:

 One of the more consistent strains in the story Naipaul tells of his own life is that it was by a pure effort of will that he became a writer. He was not gifted with fantasy; he had only his childhood in paltry Port of Spain to call on, no larger historical memory (this was where Trinidad failed him, and, behind Trinidad, India); he seemed to have no subject. Only after a decades-long labour of writing did he finally come to the Proustian realization that he had known his true subject all along, and his subject was himself- himself and his efforts, as a colonial raised in a culture that did not (he was told) belong to him and without (he was told) a history, to find a way in the world.

Pamuk's PEN Speech

Bits from Pamuk's speech, in Other Colours:

Regardless of national circumstances, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as the starving yearn for bread, can never justifiably be limited to nationalist sentiment, moral sensitivities, or hoped for international gain. Some of us have better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some like me, try to do the two things at the same time, but these attachments, this desire to understand, should never stand in the way of our respect for human rights. To change one's words, to package them in a way that will be acceptable to everyone, and to become skilled in that arena is bit like smuggling contraband through customs, and much the same way, even when successfully accomplished, it produces a feeling of shame and degradation.

Freedom of thought, the happiness that comes of the ability to express the anger deep inside us- we have already mentioned how honor and human dignity depend on it. Many writers we respect and value have chosen to take up forbidden topics purely because the very nature of the prohibition was an injury to their pride; I know this from my own experience. Because when another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.

Tread softly

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Full poem here.

...

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

~Rushdie in The Satanic Verses

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets

The book Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets aims to map the exclusions and negotiations that females of various age groups and economic classes encounter in their everyday lives in urban spaces in the city of Mumbai. Authors trio, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade have based this book on their 3 years of qualitative research and conclude that women’s presence and participation in public spaces and events has certainly increased but reserve that the city still does not offer equal claim into the realm of public safety in urban streets and spaces.

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets embarks on a significant journey on how a radically transforming city with respect to infrastructure and rapid construction, still continues to grant women only a status of secondary citizen by denying them complete safety at any time of the day. Provision of safety in urban spaces encompasses different understanding for women belonging to different economic classes. Woman travelling in a private vehicle from destination A to destination B has different safety level offered than another woman travelling from same destination A to B in a public transport.

As presented in the book, low visibility areas, poorly lit spaces, deserted streets and public transportation after sunset all consitute for unsafe environments. To counter, women alter their movement and restrict accessing urban spaces, maintaining a compromise. The book presents scenarios where this aspect of women in public spaces is so deeply entrenched that it becomes their second nature to modify their behavior. Examples like covering their chest with a book, file or dupatta, walking while gazing down and pretending to be on the phone while moving swiftly away into private spaces are common glimpses.

What is curious about the book is that investigates various economic and communal settings and how each is unique in providing different degree of freedom and social constraints. So a city, essentially an amalgam of various faiths and religion and cosmoplitan in its claim, provides a different level of freedom in varied communities. And women are not let loose from the clutches of moral policing in the name of safety. She can be letched, eve-teased, groped, stared and made to feel voilated, possibly anywhere. On the other hand, the same does not apply for men, as the authors point out. Men move about and expand their access to urban spaces more vigorously and more importantly any time of the day. Thus enabling more choices with respect to jobs they take up or engage in various social gestures.

This book presents scenarios of Mumbai’s changing landscape and how this emerging urban fabric could be flawed from equitable development and equal access to all citizens. And this is where I see authors blurring issues of gender humiliation to urban development. The two are distinct issues and a very organic development devoid of zoning has not been a solution either, as suggested by the researchers. Women’s safety in a city is not an unique Indian issue. Its rampant here could be a case of cultural baggage of gender hierarchy and its related perils.

The Dirty Picture

She is unapologetic, unabashed through and through and she does things as she wishes to and just laces it with clever one or two liners and you chuckle, giggle and Silk moves on with her next move. She rips apart all the layers of systematic Indian hypocrisy and quite mercilessly so. And why not, she has learned her lessons very early of this hypocrisy and its vacuousness that Indians proudly swear by. She has learned watching through that key hole that a man can manage to move on from one woman to another quickly and duplicity comes to him naturally. She knows, if she followed the same behavior, she will be labeled loose, lewd and lustful. Guess what, she doesn't care or at least that is what she projects.

The Indian system which puts such a premium on a girl to be 'morally good' one who cares for her modesty and fall in the system's expectation, one of marriage followed by babies or else she falls short of some God forsaken womanhood. And, so even in her rebellious avatar, Silk, ends her life in bridal clothes. One she desired or society desired of her is hard to say.

Movie is pacy, replete with clever one liners and it does not dwell on nuances for too long and there isn't anything to whine about. Nothing at all. A montage, accolades worthy.

On a lighter note, will ooh la la be as perky or "bombatt" without Bappi Lahiri's voice? Think about it.

On Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

... despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

…change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.

Excerpts from an interview on Better Angels of Our Nature and Why Violence Has Declined

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson

Its difficult to have missed Sir Ken Robinson's talk which is available on TED and perhaps one of the most devoured talk of our time. His wry sense of humor, nailing the ailments of current education system, all laced with his profound understanding on the topic which he talks with ease. One of the recent watch made me impulsively buy his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

His book is a fine extension of things he talks about: creativity, education, its manifestation in a system, a system that perhaps has gone wrong in a severe way. And is looking for ways to change, louder than ever: change that he professes, transformation in a revolutionary way rather than just revising a system. And he does it with pure examples of many creative people who rejected the system, found themselves misfit in a system and kept looking for their creative passion till they discovered it. He urges to look away from the current industrialized model of education and find ways which leverages human diversity in a rich way to save ourselves from an impending crisis of severely damaged human ecology.

He emphasizes that culture itself is strict system, a manifestation, a structure to organize ourselves in an earnest attempt to define our identities.

Culture is a system of permissions.

First we create a system of culture, we put certain parameters of behavior, acceptable & non- acceptable ones. And in doing so, we start putting expectations and sub-consciously demand things and indirectly command people to behave in certain ways in a restrictive way. But things do not always behave in a pre-determined or a predictable manner. Life is not linear, in fact it is extremely organic. To deal with unpredictability and non-linearity, we need to be flexible enough to explore alternate creative paths. And thus he rejects uniformity and homogeneity of a systematic pre-approved thinking.

We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

Book is a celebration of his revolutionary thinking which he has formed over a period of time after interacting with several diverse people across the globe, their journey (sometimes a difficult one) to find their passion and being in one's element, their only element which places them in this magical space in mind where they cannot imagine doing anything else. It breaks all the shackles of a system and frees people to follow that inner inkling of heart whatever that talent might be. For example, so many cultures still emphasize and define a women's secondary role in the system, her delusional image of nurturing the humanity, motherhood and a gender which should bring glamor and gloss to the settings. He says,

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident- all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

Atul Gawande's Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performer Better?

Every time you read essays written by Atul Gawande you are on a high, high achieved through his honest and extremely sorted thought process. He brings his perspective as a physician/surgeon but he correlates his learning and understanding quite easily to other professions and disciplines. His latest essay had the same impact, same heady impact. This is not the first time, I have longed to read his books. Below is an excerpt from his aforementioned article:

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion. Local health systems may need to go the way of the Albemarle school district. We could create coaching programs not only for surgeons but for other doctors, too—internists aiming to sharpen their diagnostic skills, cardiologists aiming to improve their heart-attack outcomes, and all of us who have to figure out ways to use our resources more efficiently. In the past year, I’ve thought nothing of asking my hospital to spend some hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the surgical equipment I use, in the vague hope of giving me finer precision and reducing complications. Avoiding just one major complication saves, on average, fourteen thousand dollars in medical costs—not to mention harm to a human being. So it seems worth it. But the three or four hours I’ve spent with Osteen each month have almost certainly added more to my capabilities than any of this.

Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology. We await every new cancer drug as if it will be our salvation. We dream of personalized genomics, vaccines against heart disease, and the unfathomed efficiencies from information technology. I would never deny the potential value of such breakthroughs. My teen-age son was spared high-risk aortic surgery a couple of years ago by a brief stent procedure that didn’t exist when he was born. But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology. We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

Complaints

I figure, complaining, is a form of luxury. A privilege, if one wants to label it. Perhaps from our impatience, restlessness and a need to be heard. What if, you did not have access to vent, access to complain, to simply offload and step aside? What would you do?

You turn inwards perhaps, reason in all possible ways and reach within for a solution. Perhaps, complaining is an outwardly, somewhat noisy expression, as I see it.

Turning inwards, in absence of such luxurious mechanism of venting, you struggle more honestly, gain focus with the energy conserved, focus that is geared towards something more.

Think Different

To Steve Jobs and his Apple Inc., salüt!

José Saramago's All the Names

...In order to reach it, it might still be necessary to fight the dragon. This one does not have furious, drooling jaws, it does not snort smoke and fire through its nostrils, it does not roar loud as any earthquake, it is simply a waiting, stagnant darkness, thick and silent as the ocean deeps...

Senhor José, the protagonist of All the Names, thinks to himself, a thought flickering on his mind over outcomes of his dark deed, an inexplicable obsession about a woman, who is an absolute stranger to him. Can't say that it's a great book but I could not put it in bad reads altogether, either. There were some portions which I felt were little more than ordinary. May be I need to read some more of his work to appreciate better. Perhaps, all is not lost when you are left with neutrality. Although, there is a quote in the book that made a lot of sense:

After all, we were not born on this earth, only to connect with God.

Delhi Belly

Next few paragraphs are strictly about Delhi Belly/ Aamir Khan and why it was such a below ordinary effort from otherwise acclaimed minds in Bollywood. If you have really enjoyed the movie, you may not like to read what I have to say. Just close the browser tab and leave.

The movie is replete with fart and number 2 jokes. I get it, but how many times, not the entire 80 minutes. Darn it. Move on man, what else you have got? Nothing really. Weak story line, loose plot, childish screenplay, desperate attempts to make audience laugh. Ceiling collapsing, diamond packet mix-up with stool sample. I get it, the attempt was to fill the scenes with fart noises, display of filthiest toilets. Clever? No. Far from it. A little too desperate to your face but failed attempt in so many ways at so many levels. Unless audience is assumed as a bunch of college kids only who 'loved' 3-Idiots just so much and wanted to take that experience one step ahead. Sure, it would have worked. But it didn't for me. It might be working for a specific target section. And that would be the obvious guess from this effort.

It has become clear to me, once the names are popular like Aamir Khan, anything he packages with his brand name it becomes a hit, irrespective of substance. Yes, comedy movie can be classy too and that is where Delhi Belly failed (so had 3-Idiots) on an epic scale. It is strange that he is the same guy who gave us Taare Zameen Par or Peepli Live for that matter. But again, brains behind both these movies were different than Aamir Khan, he just happened to get all the limelight. He does it with such finesse that people are drowned in his aura of front facing that it makes it appear that it's all his effort. And he is the only man who is lugging the talent van in Bollywood.

Anything You Want

Anything You Want. A book by Derek Sivers. His first book. It's out there for sale, now, since yesterday, and its already down with 45% discount. Derek's post on Loss is something I have gone back and read multiple times. It's something I have treasured as an online discovery. Very dearly and closely.

Seth Godin on book's brilliance, here.

PS: Derek has also added my name along with others under acknowledgment for providing feedback/critique on the unpublished version of the book. So if you are one of my friends then you might want to jump and buy the book to see my name in there...:).

You don't say

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

There's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. But they're important to us, nonetheless, because they are what connects us to thoughts other than those belonging to us.
~Iris Murdoch

Yet we talk, to overcome silences. Fear silences, for the discomfiture it brings us. We find quietude eerie and try and fill it up with words.

Comfortable Activism

True activism must not be an easy path. Asking uncomfortable questions to the point of extreme discomfort and working with people whose rights have been compromised, infringed and trampled upon appears to be lot more difficult than this new wave of online activism and this rising clique of bored professionals who indulge in concern almost to a point you may just as well cringe as if its their make belief profession bequeathed by 24/7 internet availability and its million flowery offerings in organizing someone's suffering and its existence into their own forced importance. As someone said,

We agreed: it seems improbable that after years, decades, of politics, action, research, we can still be so easily shocked. You know it’s not uncommon to hear activists, while discussing quotidian barbarities - the system’s incredible & everyday sadisms - confessing, almost sheepish, ‘I was actually shocked.’ Embarrassed at the naivety that we’re still stunned...(contd under Thesis on strange surprise )

Himanshu Kumar of VCA shares his experience on this virtual albeit fake activism. You discern.

...

People who are in love and people who are in love with the idea of love are remarkably different.
No?

Songs of Sapphique

"I have walked a stair of swords,
I have worn a coat of scars.
I have vowed with hollow words,
I have lied my way to the stars."

From someone who also said,

"Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know."

Snow

"How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?"

*
"There are two kind of men, said Ka, in a didactic voice. The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her."

**
Both these quotes are from Snow of Pamuk which I haven't read. But quotes were worth scribbling down in that little gray notebook.