i-told-you-so dept.
The mess in Iraq gets harder to clean up.

crazy-li'l-thing dept.

The poetry of Persian poet Al-Nawaz can still be heard at street corners in the towns of Khorasan. A new English translation by Engelbart Fitzwater of his lovelorn poetry can now be found in the neighbourhood Crossword's. Al-Nawaz lived almost four centuries ago in the dusty and disease ridden neighbourhoods of the cities of Khorasan, but his desires and unrequited passion still resonate today. One of the earliest known master of what was to become the 'ghazal', his keen insight sometimes is overshadowed by the unmitigated intensity of his unconnsummated love.

The target of his lustful affections, unfortunately, is lost to us in the mists of history. But the intensity of his feelings still live on in these ghazals, even though we can only speculate as to the identity of his muse.

It is my intention to serialize some extracts from the book here, to trace the growth of his poetry from the transparently obvious to the deep mysticism and unforced, unpretentious maturity of his later work.

So, to begin with, a simple offering:

Like an earnest field, I waited for a mass of grey
When only a twinkling of a drop would wash me away

The dull night and the silence, dear friend
Only your heartbeat keeps oblivion at bay

'Tis verse for the heart we recite, not holy writ
Things yet unwritten, one still has to say

Some things are born and crawl, others perish
You are the one that willingly lost his way

Gaze at the moon, 'Al-Nawaz', savour its contours
For she must set, night too gives in to day

holding-my-breath dept.

Most of the national channels are reporting (only in text) that the film I mentioned in my last post -- श्वास -- has been nominated for the Oscars. Now I can't find anything on the web, and it seems too early for Oscar nominations to be announced. Most likely its been selected as India's entry for the Oscars.

Anyways, great day for Marathi films, literature, culture. Every Marathi should be proud!

rotten-fish dept.

Just had a glance through N.P.Gogate's wonderful novella भाऊचा धक्का. It was a revelation to see that Marathi literature, even after the recent loss of the erstwhile masters, still manages to throw up a few gems now and then.

Gogate writes sparse, knife-sharp prose that pierces like a rapier to the heart of the matter. But in spite of his terseness he has a great sense of atmosphere, and especially notable are his wonderful descriptions of the fish markets in and around Mumbai. They almost bring out the sultry odour of pomfret and zhinga selling in the open stalls.

Marathi literature and cinema seem to specialize in the analysis of childhood and the preservation of childish innocence (Sane Guruji's श्यामची आई being a case in point, so is the recently released, National-Award-winning movie श्वास). Gogate does not dare stray from the formula in his debut, but even inside the strict matrix of his formula, he establishes himself as a thinker of great originality and freshness (can't say that about the Mumbai fishmongers' wares that permeate the goings-on in the book though).

So Gogate's novella brings us Shailesh Kolvandkar, an intense, rootless young adult trying to explore his own past. His search leads him to a small fishing village (one of the many now being slowly consumed by that relentless narwhal of a city -- Mumbai) on the Malabar coast, and there he plants himself expectantly, waiting for his past to catch up with him.

What Shailesh sees instead is a dynamic, rapidly changing world, with the giant city closing in, and old ways of life being permanently obliterated. After spending many pages trying to save an old Kolin from losing her shop to the 'big fish', Shailesh comes to realise the inevitability of change, and more importantly, the fruitlessness of clinging on to the past.

Part of his search is consumed by an obsession for the pomfret with the perfect smell to match his childhood memories. In his torrid affair with a bright young Koli girl, yearning to leave the dying community, he finds the odor of his dreams (don't ask me where or how!!!), and that is essentially the beginning of the end.

dozing-at-work dept.

Why are some things inherently soporific? Telecom, for instance. Can't seem to stay awake through any lecture on Telco infrastructure technology. Maybe its the gentle, rocking beat of acronyms flying thick and fast. But my eyelids begin to droop, and the speakers voice fades gradually until it becomes a distant echo on some static-ridden, ancient PSTN line.

Have to read this article posted on /. to cure my inexcusable ignorance.
Also, got to get through this interesting CPU performance analysis up at AnandTech.

Google may be working on a new browser. Why, in heavens name, I do not know. Maybe they're only brow(ser)-beating a certain other company into upgrading its own.

glassy-eyed dept.

A casual discussion over lunch brought back memories of college and university. Not the kind that have to do with social situations, but the purer more important(?) kind, of work and learning and instruments and misconceptions.

The Economist has an interesting piece in its technology quarterly this fortnight, which talks about “cognitive enhancers”, or drugs that sharpen mental responses and enhance mental acuity.

According to the article drugs are currently in clinical trials and are only a few years away from hitting the market.

polish-sausage dept.

Hmmm....I saw this awesome Polish film recently (one of the lesser known films of the famous communist-era director Kitti Fektowski) which begs to be remade with an Indian locale. I only vaguely remember details of the plot, but here's a brief summary:

A poor farmer is beset with problems -- his crops fail for two successive years, and he finds himself neck-deep in debt with the local money-lenders. In the midst of all this turmoil (he is beaten up by goons hired by the loan sharks, and the threat of losing his fields is very real), his son picks up a stray dog and brings it home.

The poor man doesn't need another mouth to feed, and ignores the poor mongrel until, as is the way with most of our childhood infatuations, his boy loses interest in this new-found plaything.

One drunken night, when he is alone under a lustrous full moon casting a clear ethereal light on his dying fields (captured brilliantly by the cinematographer using some sort of diffusing filter), and on the verge of a grisly suicide by guzzling down a vat of pesticide, the farmer notices the dog (now out of canine adolescence and entering adulthood) beside him. There is a look of sneering contempt on the dog's face (I don't know how they managed to capture that).

The recalcitrant farmer stands down, and possibly to make amends, makes the dog his 'pet' project . He takes him everywhere he goes, and where the dog goes, he follows. His family is distressed, horrified at his blatant neglect of his fields.

Then one day, the man has an epiphany that changes him forever. On a plain, arid piece of god-forsaken land, he and his dog are confronted by a pack of voracious wild dogs. The farmer's dog brilliantly counterattacks and sends them 'pack'ing. This scene was particularly hair raising -- looked as if they used a bunch of steadycams, whirling around at canine perpective level. The fight was brilliantly choreographed (some shades of John Woo there?).

Anyway, the farmer sees the error of his ways -- sees that history is forged by those who take, not by meek submissive fools (like the one he has been). The scene fades out with a long-shot of him hysterically laughing and rolling about on the ground while the dog watches on with a perplexed look (although there is perhaps a hint of a knowing wink in that look.)

Then the predictable climax follows -- the farmer hatches diabolically cunning, fiendish schemes to pick off his enemies one by one, until he is left the undisputed master of his fields, and more. The film ends with the man reconciled with his family (his wife, full of disdain and a distant coldness before, now warms up to him after he rapes her in a pig-sty in a particularly steamy scene.). The final scene has him glaring down at the expanse of his dominion, with a monster harvest in the offing, watching his dog tearing down like the wind through the waving stalks of wheat (or barley or maize or what-have-you). I laughed and cried and basically had a ball watching it. Forget the name of the flick though. Maybe imdb has some stuff on it...

classy-at-the-theatre dept.
I managed to watch three films during the just concluded Asian Film Festival, right across the street from my house. The Chinese film Postmen in the Mountains left an indelible impression on my mind, not so the other movies, with the possible exception of one other film, newcomer Samyak Sandipani's My friend Saleem.

The film documents the friendship between two undergraduate engineering students who come together in one of Maharashtra's private engineering colleges. This is a pathbreaking film (maybe I use that qualification too freely) possibly the first to take a candid, realistic look at higher education and student life in our colleges.

Rahul is from the countryside from a typical small-town middle class family (the kind that budgets for buying soap). Akhilesh is the son of NRI parents living somewhere in the Middle East or in Souteast Asia. By a strange quirk of fate, these disparate creatures are thrown together in the same dorm room, and the film builds its narrative from there.

A montage of small, poignant sequences during the titles introduces us to both of these characters as they embark on their journey to the college. Once there, predictably enough, the film follows the inevitable clash of cultures between the determined, bookish and overly pragmatic Rahul and the free-spirited, sensitive, na‹ive Akhilesh as they both come to grips with new surroundings.

After this, the film splits into two narrative threads that are occasionally intertwined and then unify into a single logical whole as the film climaxes.
Akhilesh falls for a girl quite obviously not meant for him, and gets his heart broken, trying to compete with his 'localite' competitor.

This is a brave attempt to analyse adolescent social groupings in modern India. A spate of 80's American 'high-school' movies (The Breakfast Club, Breaking Away, or the more recent Mean Girls) have superficially dealt with this issue, but Sandipani opts for a more profound look at the underlying socio-economic and cultural factors that decide how young people of today factor in peer pressure and media images into their decision making. He seems to make the interesting hypothesis, for instance, that economic awareness greatly affect individual maturity. In a male-dominated culture like India, women very rarely are allowed to fend for themselves, and this causes their world view to become skewed -- they see the world only through the eyes of men around them. Akhilesh's experiences somehow seem to reinforce this hypothesis, and he finds himself unable to surmount the social barriers erected against him (through innuendo, deceit and misrepresentation) by his competitors.

A much more fascinating and profound narrative thread, however, revolves around the serious, academically inclined Rahul. He ends up being cruelly manipulated by one of his professors who publishes some of Rahul's work as his own. Shaken and disillusioned by what he considers to be a betrayal of the scientific spirit, more than anything else, he quickly descends into a vortex of ruthlessness and cynicism.
He only manages to rediscover his humanity when he helps Akhilesh deal with his heartbreak, and manages to recover his 'soul' from the brink of infamy.

Along the way we see interesting exchanges between Akhilesh and Rahul, as their relationship evolves from a wary mistrust (often descending into irritability) to mutual respect and acknowledgement.

The end finds them, if a little chastened, looking ahead to life as independent, free-thinking individuals, assured of their own place and identity and yet sensitive to the environment around them.

regarde la pluie dept.
The rains have now left for the North. The days are now stiff and cold with a hint of golden yellow that warms the face in the afternoons, but only a hint.
Only two weeks ago, on a sunny weekend, I would wake up (not later than 10) to the chirping of unknown birds. Outside the kitchen window I could see the shivering leaves of shrubs, bathed in a necklace of dew-drop diamonds.
If I closed my eyes, I could hear the traffic on the road outside, falling at me like tired sea-waves, in crests and troughs.

and yet....
It is possible to defraud the reaper. A man can scatter the seeds of his imagination during his lifetime among the people around him, and immmortalise his essence.
It is far more cruel then, to starve a man of the opportunity to express his identity then to cut his throat.

deathly serious dept.
Death lurks at every corner. It is the curse of mortals and possibly their only salvation. Yet we are so oblivious to it, until it strikes sudden like a malicious viper gliding in the grass and takes a living man in its grip.
And yet the venom persists and festers even after the dead are only a figment of our imagination. Because with death, also die memories and words and emotions and a host of other components that make us individual sentient beings. It is only with sudden realisation that you internalise the fact that part of you is dead forever, too.

straw-dogs-dept.

Curzon's Books is a really small bookstore I came across this week in one of the by-lanes of Prabhat Road. The shop is run by an old Anglo-Indian lady, claiming direct descent from, of all people, Lord Curzon. It was already considerably disorienting for me to see someone of foreign descent managing to entrench themselves in Pune's Brahmin heartland. Add to that the unthinkable idea of her running a book-store catering to readers of Marathi. That she should claim descent from one of the most hated Viceroys of colonial India, infamous only for his ill-advised partition of Bengal, and later his obstinate opposition to the women's suffrage movement in Britain does not cast any illumination either. Stranger things, however, are known to have happened.

But then again, I digress.

One book in particular caught my eye for the sheer audacity of its title. पुण्याचे कुत्रे आणि त्यांचे साम्राज्य (पुरुषोत्तम प्रका., पुणे) (The Dogs of Pune and Their Empire) by Dr.V.S.Rajpurohit.

Dr. Rajpurohit claims to be a reader in Sociology at the University of Pune. I must confess to not having heard of anyone of that name, and some queries to acquaintances haven't been of much use either. The most obvious hypothesis is that the author is writing under a pseudonym. But that does not explain the need to so brazenly declare oneself a fraud. Surely, a book with as intellectual a tone as this would inevitably fall into the hands of the most ruthless of cynics that this city has to offer (yes, I refer to certain world-famous individuals from one of the equally world-reknowned 'Peths' of the old city).

Perhaps with his brazenness, the author also expresses his amorality -- his disdain for the laws of men and yet an affinity for the canine world that surpasses in its (well, for lack of a better word) dogmatism, the most fanatic of religions.

The book itself begins innocuously enough, by etching out in well-measured words, the geographical lay-out of Pune. Very meticulously, and with the air of a master violinist tuning his instrument, Rajpurohit (I have resigned myself to calling him by that name) catalogs the breeds and social hierarchies of the mongrels that inhabit its streets. Typically, he completely ignores the domesticated variety, preferring to look at them as only passive gene-pools that scatter their seed now and then to the 'real' population outside.

The subsequent portions of the book then set an unrelenting pace for ideas and insights that lasts till the end. This is where Purohit is in full flow, as he paints before us a vivid, evocative picture of the lives of these canine dwellers. Their street-wars, their alliances and betrayals, lust and affection, not to forget their ugly yet unalienable facets -- cannibalism, incest and disease. He shows a remarkable zest and empathy for their stories, and an even more astounding analytical mind when it comes to guaging their territorialism and sense of good and evil. For instance he tells us that the small lane that straddles Raviraj Hotel off Bhandarkar Road is home to a bunch of albino siblings. From certain genetic markers (this scientific discourse was frankly beyond me), Rajpurohit deduces the existence of an "illicit, passionate tryst of unmitigated lust between a pure Dalmatian and a common mongrel of mixed blood". The siblings themselves, claims Rajpurohit, stake their claim on the extent of this lane (not more then a hundred steps long), and exhibit a unique degree of discipline and organization in their pack behaviour. A token based system ensures that the road is constantly watched. Each individual takes turns resting and fornicating. Occasionally they will venture out into the other surrounding bylanes of Bhandarkar Road. On such occasions, the unit displays military precision in their attacks on their fellow canines, and a very well-defined hierarchical system for distributing the spoils of war. The description is almost too surreal to be true.

Refreshingly, unlike other Marathi authors, Rajpurohit does not shy away from classical English references either. "Let loose the dogs of war...", he snarls, spewing forth vitriol in his tirade against the Pune Municipal Corporation's pest control department.

So it is with some bewilderment that I consider the case of Dr.Rajpurohit. He writes in a highly stylized, idiomatic Marathi, and feels completely at home with the lastest forensic techniques in his field as well as classical English literature. One wonders, whether a man of such diverse faces would find the world of men large-hearted enough to accomodate him. It is only inevitable then, that such an excellent man should go to the dogs.

another-day dept.

Another tiring day, spent fixing bugs. Only 3 weeks ago I was in another country, living a different life, staring at a different colour of wall when I came home.
All this constant migration is making me rootless.
It already has, actually.

spanish-connection dept.

About two years ago, a friend of mine mentioned that Jorge Luis Borges was the greatest author not to be awarded the Nobel prize. I had never heard of this Borges fellow. Not a single mention even from people I had expected to be in the know about this here literature business.
Then some months after that, I was in the US, and I went through Barnes&Noble looking for this enigmatic person (I couldn't even spell his name then), and found him.
My initial reaction on reading Collected Fictions, a translation by Andrew Hurley, were ummm..everything from perplexity to jealousy to plain distaste to sneaking admiration.
Borges is a hard author to read. (Maybe it was just the translation). His language, especially later in his career, is very laconic, terse, yet replete with allusions and casual references to things that any average human being may not have a clue about. So looking beyond the name-dropping that his books are riddled with, and parsing this into something closer to our own understanding requires some work.
But beyond that, A few quick notes on Borges as a writer.
- Does not write about psychology, politics, social problems etc. the way the other novelists do.
Umm, to put it another way, these themes play cameos in his story, but never have star value.
- Focuses on ideas, they are central theme of the story. In fact his stories are always about ideas he has, rather than the other way round for most novelists.
- Writes tersely, laconically -- a sentence sometimes sums up what could be a 1000-page novel. e.g. "Just as some men court a woman just to get her out of their mind...". Just that single sentence can potentially spawn a slew of movies, novels, poems, whatever.
- Writes Apocrypha. True genius is incredibly lazy. Ordinary mortals will first build the outline of the plot, then construct the story/novel/movie etc. around it. Borges builds his plot, then assumes that the story has already been built, the gaps filled, the grunt work done; and then reviews this as the work of some fictional character.
Truly awesome. He is not funny or ironic enough though (although he still has a lot of humour in his books -- he stops short of parodying himself, sometimes, although he does that too).
Pu La Deshpande has written similar stuff with equally great insight, but with a much superior class of wit and humor.

dead-poets-society dept.

Two poets have always haunted my soul. At least it seems that they have been with me always, but I only really
have been familiar with them for the last three years or so.
I had heard mention of both of them, but being somewhat allergic to poetry (love poetry, yuk!!!) I'd never really read any at all,
let alone the so-called premier Marathi poets. It was only out of morbid curiosity that I picked up (read, stole) Mardhekaranchi Kavita
from my grandfather's study, to understand what the fuss about Pipaat Mele Olya Undir was. I found myself sucked into a vortex
of undefinable angst and beauty and sincere anguish and everything else, that I am still trying to navigate.

WORK IN PROGRESS...

सागरास
ने मजसी ने परत मातृभुमीला
सागरा प्राण तळमळला । सागरा ।।

भूमातोच्या चरणतला तूज धूता । मी िनत्य पािहला होता ।
मज वदलासी अन्य देशी चल जाऊ । सृष्टीची िववीधता पाहू ।
तई जननी ह्रुद् िवरहशंकीतही झाले । पिर तुवा वचन ितज िदधले ।
मार्गस्थ स्वयी मीच पृष्ठी वाहीन । त्विरत या परत आिणन ।

िवश्वसलो या तव वचनी मी ।
जगद्नुभव योगे बनुनी मी ।
तव अिधक शक्त उद्धरणी मी ।
येईन त्वरे कथून सोडीले तुजला । सागरा ।।

- िव.दा.सावरकर

my-unicode-musings dept.

Trying out unicode with blogger -- gee, I hope this works!

अंशुमान कानेटकर

If you were able to read my name in Devanagri script, I've succeeded.

where's-johnny dept.

Just last week, I saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico -- the quixotic new Robert Rodriguez film -- whups 'flick', as rodriguez would himself like us to call it. On the web, this movie has elicited a mixed bag of reactions, the dude who reluctantly tagged along with me disliked it vehemently. I found it thoroughly delectable; of course, though I was disappointed with the meatless sandwich that was Salma Hayek's role.

Well, not really. Maybe Rodriguez isn't intimidated by his characters. He can hack, cut, edit his way among them with the same ruthless efficiency with which his hero, 'El', dispatches the bad guys with his exploding guitar. But you can't wish away the entertainment value of Johnny Depp's dapper, chilly CIA agent asking his Mexican informer: "Are you a Mexi-can or a Mexi-can't?". Or gorging himself on slow-roasted pork. Or his prosthetic arm. And of course, his version of the famous American cellular add, moving into the frame, cell in hand, and asking, "Can you here me now? good!".

brain-fart dept.

That's what someone just called my blog. But yesss, my precious, we shall not care about opinions, we shall have our say.

To keep the vapid friday nights from eating away at whatever's left of my ragged mind, I hauled myself and a friend over to Century 25 theatres in San Jose. The dude graciously offered to skip dinner for the movie -- and hasn't made me forget it since. Century 25 is an old run-down (I mean, by my standards) cinema house in downtown San Jose. It features what must be the most bizarre architecture I have ever seen, the roof is dome shaped, and the screen we went to was right-oriented, so people sitting on the left end were basically screwed. Boy, was it some sadistic architect's wet-dream.
The film: Lost in Translation.
A very visual movie, with sparse dialog. About a middle aged film star forging an unusual bond with a young, alienated American girl in Tokyo.
Tedious at times, but with some beautiful shots of the explosion of colour that is the Tokyo skyline. I think the attempt was to bring out nuances in the
characterizations using subtle visual cues. But most of the film is so static that it gets on your nerves at times. Bill Murray was effective though, very effectively cast -- the man with wisecracks dumped in a city where no one understands him.