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.

Statistics

Confidence in self is faith/ trust in others. Both intangible, strangely unquantifiable.

No numbers attached to its strength just members of ordinal scale: good, medium, bad. Making room for mind games.

And remain fragile and crushable, for values, justice, fairness remain malleable and not absolutes.

[Just] speaking statistically.

Greed

If you think you have overcome greed of human kind, then in all likelihood, you haven't dealt with the complying submissive weighing scale.
S-i-g-h!

Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)

Dhobi Ghat encapsulates lives of four individuals, four strikingly different individuals, from four different backgrounds and classes, belonging to four different stages of lives, who manage to merge their hues and intertwine incidences of lives by being in a complex relationship with one complex city, Mumbai Bombay. A city of hope and aspiration but also despondency and dejection.

Kiran Rao's ensemble of background and its presentation is dexterous and full of poetic details. Merging of foreground and background and many treatments of b/w cityscapes, moldy buildings, its worn-out people, complex choices, bumpy lives, personal and private moves is intelligent. Yet, somehow when the characters takeover and she begins her storytelling, something goes, may be not awry but perhaps missing the zing or brilliance that could have been. Whole movie experience gives you disparate moments to relish and you linger on to certain details and cleverness behind for a little bit longer. But overall you feel disconnected and detached or always trying too hard to anchor into most characters turmoil except for Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), an enthusiastic chirpy Muslim girl originally from UP now married to a man in Mumbai. Her trailing enthusiasm towards love, married life and small excitements of life brings her to a drastic finality. And you wonder how quietly a city engulfs a life even if its the end. And Arun (played by Aamir Khan), a recluse and a pensive painter while he gets his mannerisms of a painter quite well. He looks away if the conversation is not of his interest. He gazes at city deeply. He looks at objects for details, touches and feels them with fingers for texture to know more. He is finicky enough to use the same mug for his coffee every-time at home. Yet, when he opens his mouth, you beg God to stop him, whatever it may take to do that and you are willing to pay for it. His speaking mannerisms are abrupt and perhaps make it worse since he delivers his words in English. Awkward. Something horrifically amusing and reminds me of another disastrous effort by Hrithik Roshan in Kites. It was to, omg, stop! effect. But then that movie itself was a disaster in totality. This perhaps can be attributed to years of training them as Bollywood mold of larger than life 'superstars', where characters don't play them, they play the characters.

To conclude, Dhobi Ghat gives you several special moments to cherish, things to smile about despite its multitude cliches on Mumbai rains or romanticizing its underbelly. Its pleasurable to watch Munna (charmingly played by Prateik Babbar), and voyeuristic pleasures provided through Shai. She tells us through her character that no matter how uber cool and detached we pretend to be in public but we all still harbor this private intrusive life even if it means just speaking mild lies or intrude privately but obsessively, delving into gray areas about someone if that someone is of interest. Dhobi Ghat is about savoring these divergent vignettes, merging of characters and their habitats but regretfully its not that comes out as one cohesive experience.

Laughter(stock)

Perhaps, when fleeting laughter quietens,
enduring smiles make their way.

....

It was to this personal India, and not the India of independence and its great names, that I went when the time came. I was full of nerves. But nothing had prepared me for the dereliction I saw. No other country I knew had so many layers of wretchedness, and few countries were as populous. I felt I was in a continent where, separate from the rest of the world, a mysterious calamity had occurred. Yet what was so overwhelming to me, so much in the foreground, was not to be found in the modern-day writing I knew, Indian or English. In one Kipling story an Indian famine was a background to an English romance; but generally in both English and Indian writing the extraordinary distress of India, when acknowledged, was like something given, eternal, something to be read only as background. And there were, as always, those who thought they could find a special spiritual quality in the special Indian distress.

Above is Naipaul in The Writer and India.

If there is a silence, a dullness, a strange sense of calm, it is because the streets are full of people who have made peace with misery and helplessness; the state has banned all other possibilities, and done so with some violence.

And this is Pamuk for Kars in Turkey, while writing Snow and I found a remarkable similarity in the sentiments of both the authors.

Madame Bovary: Gustave Flaubert

Before the wedding, she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resulted from that love, she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by words 'bliss', 'passion', 'ecstasy', which had looked so beautiful in books.

From Flaubert's novel: Madame Bovary.

Ambar Se: Raghu Dixit

Happy to discover Raghu Dixit's music. May be he is already really popular, and I had not heard of him before. He is brilliant. Liked Ambar se and No man will so far. Happy to share here.

Raghu Dixit - 04 -...

Coetzee's Disgrace

Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

David Lurie in Disgrace, a middle-aged South African professor in Cape Town reflects after multiple disappointments in his own life and circumstantial failures brought upon him by himself. He is resigned towards his life and makes no attempt to resurrect what he loses with a casual affair with a much younger student. He is reckless, we get to know as we are told about his disinterest in his job, towards his personal life and missing passions. He has intellectualized all the events in his life so far. He has been dismissed from his teaching job at the university as a consequence. After which he tries to move away from things, city life, its intricacies and takes refuge at his young daughter's farm. Lucy Lurie. Lucy has chosen a country life. As David reflects his move to his daughter's house,

But he is a father, that is his fate and as a father grows older, he turns more and more- it cannot be helped- towards his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn.

All is going just like country life, until that day, the event which shakes his calm and gives rise to only, commotion of feelings, of a protective father. His daughter gets assaulted and plundered physically. After which he is not the same and probably never will be. His quiet reflections are always towards the incidence or some aspect of it.

Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood matters; a woman's burden, woman's preserve.

Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose.

And since Lucy decides to choose silence over the event of her violation, he thinks,

They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.

The book is a quick one, stunning in certain portions, a page-turner with a certain distinct quality of narrative darkness. My gripe with the book: Coetzee skipping more detailing of certain characters, like Melanie Isaac the girl he has an affair with, never makes an appearance in his life and sort of strangely disappears abruptly. And then Petrus, farm neighbor to Lucy. It is subtly hinted that he is a complex character in all its simplicity and might have something to do with the incidence but rarely gets more attention.

Reparation

When gaps get filled,
surface is created.

Orwell on Mahatma Gandhi

Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from. It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which — though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail — he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity.

Full essay here.

Its refreshing (an old essay, it just resurfaced. I might have shared this here earlier) to see a critical view on Mahatma Gandhi in a world of psued-activists who have found it fashionable to quote him and talk hastily about his philosophy.

...

Saying 'certainly' without confidence,
or,
having values without conviction,
are both ineffectual.

Design Like You Give a Dump

Where all that is toxic, is annihilated to green clouds and green thoughts.

Annie Leonard's newest addition, Story of Electronics.



Amusing thought: Imagine, Bill Gates, Gordon Moore and all those honchos taking a nice swim in a pool of same warm toxic water and saying to each other, "how are we gonna get out of that one, man!"