Stockholm syndrome

Jeffrey Eugenides took the literary world by storm in 2002 with his novel Middlesex. While talking about the life of a hermaphrodite, Eugenides, who is of Greek descent, narrated a post-modern tale of the three generations of a Greek family. He tackled themes as varied as incest and gender identity, which earned him a Pulitzer for fiction. Almost a decade later, Eugenides’ new book, The Marriage Plot, is out. It is not even half as complex as Middlesex or, for that matter, his debut novel, The Virgin Suicides.

That said, The Marriage Plot is a huge departure for Eugenides after writing something as mind-bending as Middlesex. Set in Reagan-era America, the latest Eugenides novel centres around 22-year-old Madeleine Hanna, an English major at Brown University, who is trying to write a thesis on the eponymous subject in classic English novels by the greats like Austen, Eliot, James et al. A PhD is on the cards too. In a truly life-imitating-art fashion, Madeleine’s life takes an Austenesque (it’s a made-up term) turn as she ends up caring for her super intellectual manic-depressive of a boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead.

When at his best, Leonard is a charismatic silver-tongued man who’s equally at home talking about the DNA of yeast cells and Kierkegaard’s concepts. In a rather dramatic situation, Madeleine ends up being Leonard’s live-in partner at the fellowship programme he’s pursuing at Pilgrim Lake on the mating habits of yeast. Here’s where the relationship falls apart like a pack of cards as Leonard’s medication takes a toll on his psyche and he ends up playing havoc with Madeleine’s mind as well. Like in every classic English novel, there’s a counterpoint to Leonard in Mitchell Grammaticus, a friend of Madeleine who nurtures feelings for her but his love for her never transcends their platonic friendship.

The first thought that struck me when I heard of the novel was why it took him a decade to write a novel that looks, more or less, pretty straightforward. I voiced similar sentiments when Jonathan Franzen took the same amount of time to get Freedom published after his barnstormer of a novel Corrections. It’s obvious that Eugenides had to unlearn a lot of things and write something more linear in narrative and in a throughout second-person account unlike his other two novels. This is probably his most personal novel.

What might look like a wafer-thin plot is more than just masked by Eugenides’ vivid imagination and his hands-on experience of the eighties. Right from evoking Talking Heads lyrics to the post-hippie milieu of the eighties, Eugenides lives his youth vicariously through the book. Apart from writing about Brown University, Eugenides’ alma mater, The Marriage Plot is quite autobiographical. He mines his friendship with David Foster Wallace in the way Leonard is presented: always sporting a bandanna, a philosophy junkie, chewing tobacco, depression. Mitchell is more on the lines of Eugenides himself: student of religion, Greek roots. While these similarities might give a roman à clef feel to the novel, they never impede its consistently good flow.

With Middlesex Eugenides established himself as one of the most sensitive wordsmiths in the Western Hemisphere, and he does his reputation no harm in The Marriage Plot. Here’s how he describes Madeleine’s joy during an ephemeral period of time when Leonard is back at his cerebral and cheerful best: “The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly get to a good part again, which keeps on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.”

The biggest strength of The Marriage Plot is its richly imbued characters; they are not perfect and that makes them very human. The reader will find herself at the heart of a moral nightmare throughout the novel. Why would Madeleine stick to Leonard instead of dumping him? Maybe it will give her ego a boost that her “love” brought a guy out of a deep mess. Why would she always give ideas to Mitchell if she never thought of him as anything beyond a “friend”? Maybe 22-year-olds behave so vacuously. Fittingly, the novel opens with the following Francois de La Rochefoucauld quote, “People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about.” If there’s a problem with The Marriage Plot, it has to be the backstories of Leonard and his family. His entire upbringing in a dysfunctional family in Portland is animatedly written about for something so banal. Equally weariness-inducing is Leonard’s depression that Eugenides is always skirting and never gets around to cutting to the chase.

However, these wrinkles are smoothed out soon enough whenever Eugenides is at his personal best: talking about Brown University or Calcutta, where he spent some time working in a Mother Teresa home in the eighties. And, of course, the novel is suffused with his mordant wit. Madeleine “could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight”. The reader wouldn’t mind waiting another decade if Eugenides promises something equally unbelievably beautiful.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT
Jeffrey Eugenides
Fourth Estate;
406 pages; Rs 399

Mind games

Picture this: you’re on your way to a movie and you lost some money. There are high chances that you’ll still buy the ticket thinking of it as a minor dent in your decent-by-any-standards back account. However, if you lose the ticket you might think of it as double the charge and you might very well skip the movie. Both the situations look similar but they are not. According to his dazzling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, a 2002 Noble laureate in Economics, your brain’s ‘System 2’ was at work in the former situation while ‘System 1’ was activated in the latter one.

System 1 is what stimulates our intuitions and our basic thinking automatically. While System 2 prods us to go beneath the surface and demands concentration. Aided by stupendous examples, Kahneman sets out to explain his hypothesis in an engaging manner. Sample this: “tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole”. That begs the obvious question: If we know very well that System 2 is what drives the all-important decisions, why do we rely on the unreliable System 1? The answer is that System 2 is lazy. We don’t usually prefer to burn our grey cells when System 1 has something to offer to us readily.

Divided into five parts with the two Systems as the recurring theme Thinking, Fast and Slow can easily be titled as Psychoanalysis For Dummies. There’s absolutely no human tic that Kahneman leaves out in this 500-page monument for human brain. Here are a few names that he invented to describe the cognitive illusions a human is usually prone to: “illusion of validity,” “availability bias,” “endowment effect,” “anchoring” among many others. Illusion of validity means that what we perceive as a skill that we excel in is actually not very useful. Kahneman posits that at the heart of it a stock broker and a dart-throwing chimp have nothing much to distinguish. Availability bias alludes to the basic human tendency to evaluate a situation on the basis of past knowledge, which will be exaggerated. Traveling by train because there have been a couple of air crashes in the recent past is an example.

Endowment effect can be used to define situations where we attach higher significance/cost to things that we own than when they are owned by someone else. A common example is of selling stocks that are trading higher than the ones in the red. After all, losses loom larger than gains. Anchoring can be best explained through the following example, “If you consider how much you should pay for a house, you will be influenced by the asking price. The same house will appear more valuable if its listing price is high than if it is low.” Kahneman coins an abbreviation WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) for our Pavlovian reflex of focusing on existing evidence and ignoring absent evidence.

Will these terms help us curb our natural instincts is debatable but at least Kahneman, a Princeton University professor, makes sure that we have something to address retrospectively and probably avoid in the future. Thinking, Fast and Slow might resemble Malcolm Galdwell’s Blink, a book on intuition, but Kahneman combines his superb knowledge of behavioural economics and psychoanalysis to produce something monstrously original. It’s almost like watching David Lynch’s Mullholand Drive where your intellectual toolkit is reduced to nothing in no time. The reader is bound to have lot of gotcha moments. Here’s one, “The odds that “the odds of survival one month after surgery are 90%” is more reassuring than the equivalent statement that “mortality within one month of surgery is 10%.””

The chapter on “base rate concept” according to which we presume a lot of things without ever delving deeper into the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, is the book’s major triumph. The book is a strong recommendation just for the way it exposes all the latent flaws within a human. When we witness an accident but someone else is already helping the victim we feel relieved of responsibility and get on with our usual work.

If there’s a problem with the book it has to be the glaring omission of the name of Sigmund Freud. In the 32 pages of endnotes, there’s not a single reference to the man deemed to be a one-man industry in the field of psychology in the first half of twentieth century. Freud may be regarded as a quack for his Oedipus Complex findings, which an experimental scientist like Kahneman will readily dispel as hallucinations. Still, Kahneman should have given Freud’s fancy theories a patina of respect. Apart from that, Thinking, Fast and Slow is an astonishingly brilliant book.

Blogical inclusion

The little spark that the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi ignited in December 2010 to torch himself in retaliation against corruption has engulfed the Arab region ever since. It brought the power back into people’s hands and the jitters were felt by the tyrants in Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Libya and, to an extent, Bahrain (apart from Tunisia, of course). That begs the question: would all this have been possible without the World Wide Web? Yes it was the dispossessed and disenchanted who first raised their arms against the totalitarianism, but it’s a stretch to deny the blogs played their part by sowing the seeds of discontent.

You may call Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein a Nouriel Roubini of geopolitics for predicting an Arab Spring sort of thing after his visits to Damascus and Cairo, which are chronicled in a lively manner in this book. The book is a collection of dispatches from Loewenstein’s visits to Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China in 2007 to make sense of the nascent blogging craze in these repressive countries.

In Iran, Loewenstein brings the blogging scene to life in an almost Hunter S Thompson way. He visits nooks and crannies of Tehran to meet the handful of dissenters and brings to life the doings of the Ahmadinejad regime. It surely doesn’t augur well for the argumentative nature of any country if a blogger is detained for revealing that Iran’s presidential staff bought dogs from Germany for $150,000. Even though he touches upon the familiar issues, female and homosexual repression, Loewenstein has many original points to make. He’s spot on about the underground rave party scene, where demure women let their hair down. This is something that was portrayed last year in the gritty Iranian film Circumstance.

Equally illuminating is his reportage from Cairo, the solar plexus of the Arab Spring. Loewenstein chats with quite a few bloggers who raised their voices against the corrupt regime of Hosni Mubarak. Over the course of his trip, Loewenstein unearths blogs and websites that convey the Egyptians’ anguish in a more nuanced manner than the Western corporate media stationed there. Loewenstein’s trip to Syria is also as revealing and it confirms theories that the Arab Spring was in the making for a long time; all it needed was one small push, which Bouazizi provided.

The Blogging Revolution will be remembered for its prescience. A blogger tells Loewenstein in 2008, “If Mubarak lost power, the Islamists would take over and cause trouble.” This is exactly what looks like is happening in Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster. The book lays bare how misguided the perception of blogs being “echo chambers” and “information cocoons” is. This book is a perfect riposte to what Forbes once said blogs are all about: “the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.” The Arab Spring showed how the Goliaths had to surrender before the Davids whose only “weapon” is the Internet.

What pulls back The Blogging Revolution a notch or two is that Loewenstein doesn’t make much headway in Cuba and Saudi Arabia. He’s either seen dithering or the authorities never let him near the actual troublemakers. He builds his reportage more or less on an assortment of articles from various sources. Although it’s laudable that he chose to brave the odds and travelled to Saudi Arabia and Cuba, the author appears as hapless as an upended turtle. In China, Loewenstein casts a wider net and tries to ask the Chinese if freedom of speech means anything to them as long as everything’s hunky dory with their personal lives.

Contrary to what Western media reports, Loewenstein finds out that most people prefer to be insouciant about the Tiananmen massacre. “People just want to get on with their lives. It’s in the past,” tells a source to Loewenstein. Here’s how Loewenstein summarises the attitude of Chinese bloggers, “On their wish lists, a Nintendo Wii comes far ahead of democracy. Free pirated films, television shows and music are their primary concern.” However, at the end of his dispatch he concludes that the Chinese politburo cannot anaesthetise the revolutionary streak among Chinese bloggers.

Another setback for The Blogging Revolution is the way Internet revolution zeitgeist has shifted from blogging to social networking and micro-blogging. The Arab Spring really exploded when people started tweeting about the atrocities being committed by Mubarak during his last-ditch efforts to cling on to power. During the disputed elections in Iran in 2009 when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to clamp down on protests and Twitter quelled his efforts, Economist carried a headline “Twitter: 1, CNN: 0”. These minor gripes aside, The Blogging Revolution is a nice throwback to whatever monstrosities the Arab Spring managed to undo and what blogging can achieve, with its heart in the right place, in the future.

THE BLOGGING REVOLUTION
Antony Loewenstein
Jaico Books
294 pages; Rs 350

I think, therefore iPod

Exactly a decade ago the iPod was launched by Steve Jobs (bless his heart!) to a mystified audience at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. There’s a Youtube video of Steve Jobs talking about this revolutionary contraption and his swagger suggests that he knows he found the missing link between what will be the Internet generation and the preceding analog generation.

There are two ubiquitous cultural symbols that define the last one decade and both of them are white in colour: the Google search box and the iPod’s white headphones. Spartan is the word to describe both these phenomena. On Google, it’s a complete white screen with a solitary search box bang at the middle, which suggests absolutely no distraction. An iPod’s elegant design is something similar with a large enough screen and its singature click wheel, which has all the MP3 player functions, embedded seamlessly to entice both the nihilist and sybaritic.

Here was something that could hold ginormous amounts of music (right from 4 GB to 160 GB) and a massive improvement from those bulky Heath Robinson contraptions like MP3 disc player. Here’s something that fits into a pocket and can belt out a lifetime of music (20,000 songs, which an iPod Classic can hold). My initial reaction and many others to iPod was a bafflement that was last seen when Bob Dylan chose to play electric guitar. Unlike that incident, Jobs didn’t face any opprobrium and he was well on his way to be deemed a visionary.

But iPod did cause a very significant and intangible damage to the psyche of this generation and iPod is the primary reason for the ever-shrinking attention spans of the youngsters. It might seem like a facetious argument but it does stand some water. The biggest masterstroke of the iPod is the Shuffle option. "I have seen the future," Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 2004. The setting on the iPod that lets the user flit from one random track to another is where the restlessness of this generation’s lies in. Way before the smartphones and social networking sites and Xboxes there was the Shuffle option whose implicit message is “you deserve instant gratification”.

Not only that, it even did an unmitigated damage to the music industry as well. Not so long ago the English music industry used to belt out a significant number of concept albums, NAME DROPPING AHOY, the major ones being by Who (Tommy, Quadrophenia); Jethro Tull (Aqualung, Thick As A Brick, A Passion Play); the Moody Blues (Days of Future Passed, In Search of the Lost Chord, On The Threshold of a Dream, To Our Children’s Children’s Children); Emerson Lake and Palmer (Tarkus); Yes (Tales from Topographic Oceans); Marvin Gaye (What’s Going On); Willie Nelson (Phases and Stages); Jimi Hendrix (Axis: Bold As Love); ABC (The Lexicon of Love); Van Morrison (Astral Weeks); Curtis Mayfield (Superfly), Frank Zappa (Freak Out!).

As their name suggests, concept albums have a concept that runs throughout the album and the entire disc needs to be heard in the predetermined order so as to enjoy the record to the hilt. Thanks to iPod, music lovers don’t really make it a point to listen to every track the way the artists want it to be. After all, in their expertly curated playlist, the users would prefer their Mozart followed by Linkin Park who is succeeded by Miles Davis. Thus, there has been a significant decline in the concept albums in the last one decade.

Barring The Streets’ (A Grand Don’t Come For Free), Gorillaz’s Demon Days, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois and P J Harvey’s This Is England, the concept albums are on the wane. Leeds-based indie rock outfit Kaiser Chiefs released their latest album The Future Is Medieval online and asked users to handpick their favourite ten tracks out of the twenty on offer and decide on their own running order and even to design their own cover before downloading it for £7.50. In the age of an all-pervasive iTunes where you can purchase only the singles, the music groups cannot survive even if they circle their organs. Thus, the latest move by Kaiser Chiefs indicates that you are better off joining them if you can’t beat them.

Ricky Wilson, one of the band members, said in a wistful tone to Financial Times that, “A couple of weeks ago in India they manufactured the last typewriter. It won’t be long before that happens to CD players.”

Another long-term deleterious impact of iPod will be its compatibility with MP3 format of music. Thanks to the compressed music formats that are being peddled around we don’t even know what it feels like to listen to the music on vinyl records. iTunes, the software used to transfer music onto the iPod, is what I would call a software equivalent of China. It allows the user to download a track for as low as one cent and the user will be left with a smug feeling of having bought music legal but for utter pittance.

And of course there’s that ultimate criticism about iPod of it having killed the man’s commune with nature. We are so used to the constant buzzing in our ears that we make it a point to charge our iPods to the hilt in case of long distance train journeys. It’s just unthinkable to stare outside the window without those earphones blaring out some noise or the other. Every man might be an island but technically the iPod users (330 million at the last count) are this world’s largest archipelagos. Interacting with strangers, which in the pre-iPod era, was a joy to behold and equally distressing if they happen to be irritating. But at least we had a chance of interacting with someone interesting whom we otherwise might never meet in our lifetime. Nowadays, we are totally alienated from rest of the populace because our iPod is supposed to be the best companion possible.

Urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh lamented about the iPod culture in New York Times in a heartfelt manner: "In public spaces, serendipitous interaction is needed to create the 'mob mentality.' Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can't join someone in a movement if you can't hear the participants. Congrats Mr (Steve) Jobs for impeding social change." In his brilliant article for the n+1 magazine Nikil Soval found it strangely ironic that we need to be forever wired to the iPod when in fact “there is the stereo in the home, in the car; there are concerts; there are music videos, with special channels devoted to them, on the air, nonstop”. Add to this, the music played while reading, writing, cleaning, exercising, eating, sleeping.

While I might come across as a massive party pooper or a Luddite for my unequivocal rant so far, I would like to clear the air by saying that iPod is nothing less than a revolutionary gadget. It’s not for nothing that Steve Jobs is compared with Edison. iTunes allows the rarefied listeners to access artists whom they wouldn’t otherwise get to know. ITunes is democratic and is a great fountain of music. I would rather be earmuffed to Rihanna’s caterwauls if it would help in drowning out an infant’s crying when I am traveling but then not at the expense of forgetting that silence is, after all, golden.

The Grim Reaper

For anyone who cared about what’s going on in the world, the death of Christopher Hitchens was a Steve Jobs moment. When he died last month at the age of 62 due to esophageal cancer, it was the end of what may very rightfully be termed as a Hitchens era. There’s probably no major publication where Hitchens wasn’t published or translated. He was a regular writer for Slate and Vanity Fair. So vast was his erudition that he can be equally dexterous while talking about oral sex and waterboarding.

Hitchens’ journalistic oeuvre is a case study in the retention power of human brain. His friends, among whom are Iam McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, would recall that he used to recall verses and passages of the great masters of literature from the back of his hand. Nothing used to escape Hitchens hawk eye and his snark. He never endeared himself to the masses or maybe that’s how he wanted it. He was critical of Mother Teresa, Pope, Dalai Lama and even God. His book “God Is Not Great” is a, pardon the irony here, Bible for atheists. So caustic are his comments that the one at the receiving end is better off remaining silent.

Hitchens once branded Mother Teresa “a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf” and said: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

He also branded religion as “junk science” and claimed Christianity is “leaving us as the mockery of the world by pretending that we did not evolve.”

About Sarah Palin he said “She’s got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”

So brilliant are his turns of phrases, a result of his Oxbridge education, that he would elevate even the most mundane topic to the realms of fascination. He is known to have churned out perfectly readable essays in twenty minutes. Hitchens did have his own limitations though. One look at his copious amounts of work and you would notice that this man is a sexist par excellence. He once even wrote an essay for Vanity Fair on “why women aren’t funny”. There’s no woman in his exalted friends circle. None of the hagiographical essays that he wrote included a woman.

His championing of Iraq War too was a baffling decision and till date it’s a mystery why he defended George W Bush in his deluded decision to dig out the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Having said that, Hitchens is one of the most original journalists you’ll ever read. None of his arguments, however misplaced, are bland or unoriginal. He is very prolific and is known to write his perfectly readable thousand-word column for Slate in flat twenty minutes.

It’s appropriate to have a coda in the form of a Salman Rushdie quote (about Hitchens) “the most indefatigable of allies and the most eloquent of defenders”.

The big talkers

In the pantheon of Indian book talk fests, the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) is the biggest rockstar. Every year William Dalrymple and his colleagues bring together distinguished writers to talk about their work and the world. The next edition, scheduled for January 20-24, promises an array of discussions on Bhakti and Sufi traditions; the Arab Spring; Gandhi, Ambedkar and Anna; censorship; writing from conflict zones; theatre; theology; and motherhood, among other topics. Here are the headlining acts at this literary rock fest.

In “The Arab Spring: A Winter’s View”, the talking heads will be Kamin Mohammadi, Iranian writer, Navdeep Suri, retired Indian diplomat, Karima Khalil, doctor and chronicler of Tahrir Square, Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian lawyer and writer, Hisham Matar, Libyan novelist, and Max Rodenbeck, Cairo-based American journalist and writer. This should be illuminating, because the speakers have been at the forefront of probably the biggest historical event since 9/11. Matar was instrumental in Col Gaddafi’s ouster. Expect genuine insights into the movement that rocked every dictatorial Titanic.

At “Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Crossroads at Jantar Mantar” will be Joseph Lelyveld, former New York Times executive editor, Sunil Khilnani, writer and professor of politics, Aruna Roy, activist, and publishers S Anand and Urvashi Butalia. They will discuss non-violent movements in India from M K Gandhi to the Dalit movement to the ongoing Lok Pal campaign.

Among the minor gems, the discussions involving Amy Chua of Tiger Mom and Lionel “We Need to Talk about Kevin” Shriver. Chua faced opprobrium for her book in which she described being an aggressive “mom” and pushing her child hard to succeed. In two talks, one with Puneeta Roy, director of Tehelka Foundation, and another with journalist Madhu Trehan, the audience will witness the demolition of a few myths related to Chua’s method of parenting. In a tête-à-tête with TV anchor Barkha Dutt, Lionel Shriver will discuss her gut-wrenching but beautiful novel about a mother coming to terms with the loss of a son who goes on a killing spree. The novel was turned into a film this year, to rave reviews.

For the first time at JLF, famous playwrights like Tom Stoppard, Ariel Dorfman and David Hare will come, to talk about the art of writing for the theatre. Stoppard is chairing sessions on “The Art of the Play Wright”, “Adaptations” and “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare”.

Journalism will be celebrated as never before. David Remnick, editor-in-chief of New Yorker magazine, will talk about his biography of Barack Obama, published in 2010. In his distinguished career, Remnick has written about everything from Muhammad Ali to Mikhail Gorbachev and far beyond. His talks are titled “The Disappointment of Obama”, “Journalism as Literature” and “Art of Biography”.

Philip Gourevitch, former editor-in-chief of the Paris Review and a long-time staff writer at the New Yorker, will also sprinkle some journalistic stardust. His coverage of the Rwandan genocide attests to his brilliance as a reporter. At JLF, he will participate in talks on “A Good Man in Africa”, “Journalism as Literature” and “The Weather in Africa”.

Add to this list Michael Ondaatje, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Ben Okri, Hari Kunzru and Mohammad Hanif — writers and novelists all — among many others.

On the organisational front, one more tent, called Gulistan, will join the four customary ones. As it is, last year the venue Diggi Palace was denuded of horse stables to accommodate more people. Looking at the star studded literary line up, the organisers will have to clean the Augean stables this time around as well.

Lunar lunacy

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s brand of fantasy-realism is polarising and there can’t be any acquired taste about it. You either believe in talking cats and orthogonal cheese or you don’t. However, his latest opus 1Q84 is a far less demanding work of fiction but is as rewarding like Kafka On the Shore, Sputnik Sweetheart, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Set in the last nine months of 1984 in Tokyo, the three-part novel (divided into Book 1, 2 and 3) pivots around two characters: Aomame and Tengo. They have not met for two decades, but each is very much an essence in the other’s memory. Aomame is a sweet, po-faced sports club instructor with a sexual leaning towards balding men who look like Sean Connery and occasionally operates as a Manga-version of Lisbeth Salander who kills men by touching the “sweet spot” on the back of their neck. Tengo is a math instructor at a primary school and writes fiction that is yet to deserve any publishing house’s affections. The title alludes to a parallel world that the characters unwittingly walk into (number 9 is pronounced as kyu in Japanese).

Tengo is involved in the rewriting of a young girl’s novel about a cult, at the behest of his smarmy editor, Komatsu. Not so far away, Aomame is entrusted with the impossibly dangerous task of killing this cult’s leader. Murakami does well to inject a few more characters who propel the novel into the realms of brilliant storytelling. Ushikawa, a lawyer turned private detective, has a major presence in the book 3, and his Sherlock Holmes-kind deductions are an absolute delight. Tamaru, Aomame’s Man Friday, waxes eloquent on topics ranging from Carl Jung’s home in Switzerland to Chekhov’s “gun maxim”.

1Q84 was issued in three volumes to huge acclaim in Japan in 2009-10 and is destined for similar response in rest of the world as well. Right from the opening page, where Aomame is transfixed by Czech composer Janacek’s Sinfonietta, Murakami wears his Western cultural influences on his sleeve. He eschews kimono for jeans, sushi for pizza and hardly mentions sake in this hefty (932 pages to be precise) novel. Here are a few references that should give you an ample idea of what Murakami wants his reader to think about: Faye Dunaway, Duke Ellington, Janacek, Sonny and Cher, Anton Chekhov, Proust, Churchill and George Orwell.

What makes 1Q84 a fierce work of imagination is the scope that Murakami gives to his love story: Lewis Carroll meets Charles Dickens meets Philip Pullman at the same table in a jazz club in Tokyo. The way Aomame makes her way to the parallel world through an innocuous expressway is pure Carroll, Tengo’s deprived childhood could give any Dickens character a run for his money and the way parallel worlds coexist cheek-by-jowl in the novel is straight out of a Pullman book. On top of that, 1Q84 is deeply rooted in the Japanese kaidan eiga tradition and its kabuki theatre ancestry.

The part where Aomame kills the leader has more chills per sentence than the entire shower scene in Psycho and eyeball ripping in Un Chien Andalou together. Despite its size, Murakami makes sure that he weaves his yarn intricately enough to not let the reader’s attention waver. By jettisoning his usual fantasy-realism, Murakami could etch out his characters more finely and have arresting backstories that would make 1Q84 a novel easily suitable to any reader’s palate. Explicit, yet subtle and dreamlike, and more sex than is usual for Murakami, 1Q84 will transcend Murakami’s fan base.

That said, this being a Murakami novel, ordinary events do turn into extraordinary events in no time. Tengo and Aomame can see two moons in the sky, Aomame ties herself up in knots over the colour of the uniform of Tokyo Police, there’s a bizarre impregnating scene, dwarfs called Little People walk out of dead people’s mouth and any Inception fan would revel at how you can never be completely sure which world the story is taking place in. Memory plays an important part in the novel’s structured and exploding proceedings. Both the leads are forever clinging to their past despite the bad taste that it leaves in their mouths. After all, the past is something they can be at least sure of.

If any blemishes are to be picked up from this otherwise flawlessly brilliant novel, it’s the climax that is a tad contrived. The publisher appointed two translators and had them race against the time in order to release the book as soon as possible, which is why the language gets a bit jarring at times. In fact, 1Q84 was nominated for Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award for this clunky line: “A freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina look very much alike, Tengo thought.” Despite this I would say that if you have to read only one work of fiction this year, make sure it’s 1Q84.

1Q84: BOOK 1, 2 AND 3
Haruki Murakami
Harvill Secker
932 pages; Rs 649

Thomas Hardy in India

Nine years ago, British director Michael Winterbottom visited the deserts near Osian in Rajasthan for a documentary project. Though Osian did not make it to the final cut of the documentary, Winterbottom decided to make a feature film set in Osian. This is Trishna, a not-so-faithful adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which will release in India in March 2012.

The story revolves around Trishna, played by Freida Pinto, who wishes to rise in life despite her humble roots. She meets Jay Singh (Riz Ahmad), the London-bred son of a hotelier, who falls in love with her. What follows is a rollercoaster of emotions that Marcel Zyskind’s (a Winterbottom regular) camera captures unflinching, never once shying away from reality.

Asked why he chose to set Tess in India, Winterbottom says, “I think Hardy was able to capture ordinary people’s lives really well. He wrote about rapidly changing rural landscapes as a result of increased education, mechanised farming, steam engines, and so on. Right now, India is undergoing a similar change, so I thought it would be interesting to set the story in India.” Clearly, Winterbottom, who has made three films on Hardy’s novels, knows the author very well.

Shot in Osian, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Nagore and Mumbai in a short shooting schedule of six weeks, Trishna is a departure from Winterbottom’s two previous films which released last year — The Killer Inside Me which was a thriller, and The Trip, a comedy. Trishna, on the other hand, is a cross between a gritty documentary on rural India and a love story.

Unlike Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, however, Winterbottom depicts both the incredible and insipid India in the same light. On his choice of Pinto for the lead role, he says, “When I met Freida, she came across as extremely beautiful but also as someone who could convey Tess’s pain.” Pinto is not the only Indian on the film’s credits. The film has been co-produced by Sunil Bohra and Anurag Kashyap while Amit Trivedi has composed the music, coming up with an evocative soundtrack which combines Rajasthani folk music with sounds of English bands like Kasabian and Portishead.

Kashyap, Trivedi and Bollywood actress Kalki Koechlin play themselves in the movie, while Trishna’s family members are inhabitants of Osian who hosted the film’s cast and crew. In fact, some of the best wisecracks in Hindi uttered by the minor characters were spontaneous improvisations.

Recounting her experience of working on the film in Goa, where Trishna premiered at the recently concluded 42nd International Film Festival of India, Pinto says, “This is an author-backed role of a silent sufferer and Michael took me ten steps ahead as an actor.” Used to working with large crews in The Immortals and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Pinto says she found working with a small crew on Trishna an “intimate and interesting” experience.

Trishna is the third film this year to adapt a classic novel — earlier there were Cary Fukunaga’s bleak Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold’s dreamy Wuthering Heights. While both these films stuck to the novel’s plot, purists may scoff at the liberties Winterbottom takes with the original, especially in the character of Jay Singh, who is a combination of the two main male characters in the novel. But Winterbottom is undeterred. “Every human has a spiritual and sensual side which comes out at appropriate time,” he says.

But why make a movie that is so bleak, and offers little hope? “When the socio-economic conditions of people are rapidly changing, some are gainers while some are invariably left behind,” says Winterbottom. “In this period of flux, Trishna might have lost out but I show that there’s still hope for her family.”

Between the covers

A couple more weeks and the books industry will have survived another year, predictions of its imminent death notwithstanding. Yes, people are spending more time on social networking sites, giving pigeons competition in terms of attention span, and independent bookstores in the West (not just chains like Borders) are shutting down en masse, but books as such have survived.

Apart from the gloom and doom, 2011 saw the worst literary spat since Paul Theroux and V S Naipaul’s fell out. Niall Ferguson accused Pankaj Mishra of racism after Mishra’s scathing review of Civilisation: The West and the Rest appeared in the London Review of Books.

Here are a few of Mishra’s jabs. Ferguson, he wrote, is a “retailer of emollient tales about the glorious past” whose books “are known less for their original scholarly contribution than for containing some provocative counterfactuals”. He summarised Ferguson’s new book in one word: gallimaufry. Thin-skinned Ferguson threatened to take Mishra and the LRB to court for making “racist” comments and called the review “a personal attack that amounts to libel”. Mishra refused to be cowed, and is nowhere near making an apology. It remains to be seen whether in the new year Ferguson makes his threat real.

Mishra rubbed Patrick French the wrong way, too. He trashed French’s India: A Portrait so harshly in Outlook magazine that the latter retorted, “It was less a review than an ideological cry of pain,” and returned the compliment by comparing Mishra, with his “migratory bio”, with Lord Curzon.

Catfights apart, one of the bigger events was Salman Rushdie’s entry into Twitter. Other than Bret Easton Ellis, Rushdie is probably the only popular novelist who understands perfectly well how to engage his followers. When Facebook banned his profile for not including his first name (Ahmed), Rushdie took to Twitter and compiled a list of Middle Name Users: James “Paul” McCartney, Francis “Scott” Fitzgerald and Edward “Morgan” Forster, among others. If you haven’t yet read Rushdie’s limerick on TV personality Kim Kardashian’s recent divorce, you’ve missed a minor gem.

Another major controversy blew up when a judge quit the Man Booker International prize panel after Philip Roth was given the award. The judge, author and publisher Carmen Callil, said of Roth that “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”

Closer to home, the mushrooming of literary festivals was a cause of minor consternation as the same clique of writers was seen displaying its wares at every location. But then, anything that celebrates a series of dark pigments in rectilinear format has to be a good thing.

The Jaipur Literature Festival at the beginning of the year was the absolute standout among the bookfests. With the impressive lineup of international writers its organisers manage to assemble year after year, JLF is turning into the Hay Festival of South Asia. Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk, Kiran Desai, Junot Diaz, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, J M Coetzee and Vikram Seth are a few of the many writers who held the audience in thrall during the five days of the event. Next year’s list of speakers looks equally promising.

The sore thumb of the year in bookfests was Harud, the Srinagar literary festival that was indefinitely postponed because of an “open letter” that several writers of Kashmiri origin composed and circulated. The letter said that so long as human rights were being denied in the strife-ridden region, an “apolitical” festival was an absurdity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. If only it didn’t have to be that way.

Margin Call

There has been massive literature on the financial recession that shook the world three years ago. However, not many movies have been made depicting the exact turn of events. Wall Street 2 was at most middling with the usual Oliver Stone empty bluster. First-time director PC Chandor’s Margin Call makes more than a decent attempt at plugging this ever-widening gap. In his fictional account of how Lehman Brothers bit the dust, Chandor shows how harrowing those 72 hours leading to the bankruptcy were.

In brokerage parlance, “margin call is a demand by a broker that an investor should deposit further cash to cover possible losses”. The large investment bank in the movie realises that it has too many junk bonds well past their sell-by date, which it can’t sell to the investors anymore unless it doesn’t mind cheating. Thus, this dictum: “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.”

Chandor’s camera is a fly on the wall and is uncomfortably close to the faces of the dramatis personae. The viewer is bound to feel the tension. There are no two ways about it. The bank’s chairman Jeremy Irons, who is modeled on, YES, Dick Fuld, delivers a masterly performance as the man who knows end is nigh but would still delude himself that a miracle is on the anvil.

Not just Irons, each actor, the bits-and-pieces ones included, perform their part with a gusto that these themes need. Chandor manages to give everyone sparkling dialogues. In the heat of the moment, Paul Bettany stands atop the skyscraper and gets philosophical with his subordinate Zachary Quinto, “When you’re this high, you’re not afraid that you might fall, you’re afraid that you’ll fall.”

In another delicate moment, Quinto’s colleague has an epiphany that he is just “pushing buttons” and making loads of money. “I might as well play roulette,” he says.

The movie’s denouement is equally heartrending when Kevin Spacey asks the brokers to go for the broke (pun not intended) and deceive their clients. When the game’s up and only one team of players knows that, it’s an absolute rampage. This is why the Occupy Wall Street protests fall flat on one level. This quote from Reuters journalist Felix Salmon should illustrate why, “Wall Street isn’t picking the pockets of the 99% and giving the proceeds to the 1%. It’s picking the pockets of the 1% and giving the proceeds to itself.”

Humble brag

UrbanDictionary. com defines the term humble brag as, “A form of self promotion where the promoter thinks he is bragging about himself in the context of a humble statement.” This definition more or less sums up what Douglas Edwards achieves through his book I’m Feeling Lucky on his former employer Google (more on this later).

Edwards was Google’s 59th employee, was involved with the company in 1999 when it was virtually based out of a garage in Silicon Valley and he left it in 2005. Backed by seven years of solid marketing experience for the San Jose Mercury News, 34-year-old Edwards felt he deserved a tiny bit of the technology pie in Silicon Valley. He acquired the vague designation of director of consumer marketing at Google, and quickly realised it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. Here was an organisation that is as flat as it can get. He had carte blanche over various decisions and in the same way anyone could overrule his decisions as long as the alternative made sense.

With headlines inspired from the satirical website Onion (“I Go Logo Loco and Learn Good Enough Is Good Enough”, “Rugged Individualists with a Taste for Porn”, “Managers in Hot Tubs and in Hot Water”), Edwards charts the all-too-familiar history of Google, albeit with in-house jokes and anecdotes hitherto unknown to outside world. Whether this Google-y humour will make those unfamiliar with Google’s zeitgeist smile is a contentious issue but the writer deserves to be commended for the perennial undercurrent of light humour in the book. One of the chapters, “Is New York Alive?”, has the sweep of a disaster epic novel. Edwards displays all his literary chops when he describes how Google went about covering 9/11. The spot ethical decisions that Google made at that juncture demonstrate that it at least strives to live up to its credo of “Don’t Be Evil”.

Edwards’ reverence for Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page shines through the pages. All sorts of fawning adjectives are used to describe their intelligence and ingenuity. They may be valid but it would have been better if Edwards had exercised some restraint. The book’s subtitle is “The Confessions of Google Employee 59” but this is hardly a tell-all memoir. If anything, it’s a safe one. Where is the bite that was seen in, say, Stephen Levy’s In the Plex? Google’s disdain for non-engineers is legendary and an open secret, but Edwards gives this issue cursory treatment. And that’s quite discombobulating considering he was told this when he was sacked in 2005: “I’m having a hard time slotting you. I don’t really see where you fit. There doesn’t seem to be a place for ‘brand management’ in the organisation as a functional role.”

If Edwards didn’t want to burn bridges, he could have at least loosened a few screws and provided an insight like Eli Pariser did with his book The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You. If Google really purports to not be evil, why is it that search results change depending on the geographical location of a user? The only mild criticism that Edwards had was the company’s attitude towards Orkut, a social networking site. Edwards thought that the site had great potential but it was nipped in the bud because Google’s “tech snobbery” came in the way. “Because Orkut had been written using Microsoft tools, Google’s engineers deemed it not scalable. They turned their noses up at it and … they just let it die,” reminisces Edwards.

Edwards himself doesn’t have any earth-shattering contributions to speak of. Apart from coining AdWords and writing the documentation in corporatespeak (he has studied English literature at college), Edwards wasn’t a great employee. Even though he was a bit player, he invariably found himself in the enviable position of fly-on-the-wall during Google’s most momentous occasions. That is why the way Google pipped its then competitor Overture for a contract with AOL is written with a panache that will keep the reader hooked.

Coming back to the humble brag part, I’m Feeling Lucky is a litany of complaints and Pyrrhic victories that Edwards writes about in meticulous detail. Be it his tiny ego battles over inconsequential things with his superiors or an argument that he wins after intense wrangling, Edwards doesn’t let anything slip away in the ether of time. It’s not even his delusions of grandeur that let down the book; what really prevents it from being a page-turner are the useless details with which he peppers the book. Instead of providing the true insider’s lowdown on Google, Edwards dedicates pages to the canteen food and the facilities in the recreation room.

Pardon the feeble attempt at humour, but as a reader I didn’t feel lucky having to review this 400-page puff piece.

I’M FEELING LUCKY: THE CONFESSIONS OF GOOGLE EMPLOYEE NUMBER 59
Douglas Edwards
Allen Lane
401 pages; £20

Smudged ink

T S Eliot once wrote, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.” Looking at the way newspapers across the world are either going belly up or downsizing to the barest bone, Eliot is a vindicated man. My idea of an apocalyptic world is one where newspapers aren’t sold on the streets but can be read only on digital contraptions of various sizes. Thankfully, closure of News of the World brought dailies into an ephemeral limelight. That limelight is sputtering but will be alive for a while because of a few movies that released this year, which make for a pretty compelling case for the future of smudgy old newsprint in the face of new media.

One movie that makes maximum noise is the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times. Film maker Andrew Rossi is a fly on the wall of the media desk of the Gray Lady and tries to portray how the world is a much more uncomfortable place to live in without newspapers (especially NYT). Page One is a documentary for news junkies that charts the apogee and perigee of arguably the best newspaper in the world: Pentagon Papers expose and the utterly discredited reporting of Judith Miller in Iraq respectively.

David Carr, the crusty media columnist of NYT and a former crack addict, is at the heart of the documentary whose spit-and-vinegar nature is an absolute delight. Right at the documentary’s fag end the viewer gets to see how Carr is ripping a Tribune Company’s executive to shreds for having the gall to accuse Carr of doing a “top to bottom hatchet job”. The ‘job’ here refers to the story that Carr eventually wrote about the company's bankruptcy and the rampant sexual transgressions that reduced the esteemed publication to a “fraternity house”. Carr takes a jibe at the ever-expanding Internet news machine and rightly so.

The earliest beacon of investigative journalism was Hunter S Thompson whose truculence produced some of the best pieces the world has ever seen. However, Thompson’s brand of journalism is something else, a kind of new journalism. While he was commissioned to cover a certain happening, his shoe-gazing self would unearth something else that would be oblivious to every other pair of journalistic eyes.

The Johnny Depp-starrer The Rum Diary is an adaptation of his book with the same title that he wrote in Puerto Rico while he was working with a newspaper called San Juan Star during the sixties. A young Paul Kemp (Depp) is assigned to write astrology columns and rambling pieces about American tourists that land up on the island to go bowling.

The movie’s shining moments are to be seen when Depp and his two amigos, the leathery photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli) and a batty religious affairs correspondent Moburg (Giovanni Ribisi), get their banter going.

When Sanderson, a local mercenary played with an understated menace by Aaron Eckhart, asks Kemp to write a few flattering pieces about a real estate ripoff that he has in mind, the old school journalistic ethics start kicking in. Realising that he is turning into a bedfellow of the deep-pocketed evil men, Kemp tries to expose them but his troubles are such that he utters this line when at the printing press, “Do you smell it? It’s the smell of b**tards. It’s also the smell of truth. I smell ink!”

If Rum Diary is about journalistic ethics, Errol Morris’ purely entertaining documentary Tabloid lays bare how the Tabloids slug it out for that all-elusive ‘exclusive’. In the 1970s, Joyce McKinney, a Miss Wyoming and absolutely gorgeous woman, was accused of kidnapping and raping her erstwhile boyfriend who turned into a Mormon. While a fair bit of Tabloid is dedicated to how Joyce went about with her ‘act’, what Morris shows is the dog-eats-dog ethos of the Tabloid culture. Here were two premium UK Tabloids — Mirror and Daily Express— that were desperate for any scrap pieces of the story as long as it’s ‘exclusive’.

Closer to home, Tamil flick Ko is about an audacious newspaper photographer (played by Jeeva) who gets involved in journalistic capers that would make even Clark Kent blush. But then, at a time when Indian movies are all about wall-to-wall television coverage (cue Peepli Live), Ko redeems the declining habit of appreciating what’s on the front page.

Economics 2.0

I have a modest alternative in mind for the Occupy Wall Street and its variants that are spreading their tentacles across the developed world. Let the 99 per cent lay a siege against all the banks and ask for its money to be returned, something that James Stewart underwent as the head of a bank in the 1946 classic It’s A Wonderful Life. That way, we can no longer blame ourselves for lining the “one per cent’s” pockets. If you think I’ve lost my marbles, you are not the reader Charles Eisenstein wants to attract through his book Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition.

This book is Eisenstein’s clarion call to the world to jettison all its prized possessions and get together again to build a new world. This world would invert all the cherished tenets of conventional economics and instead use new concepts like de-growth, underproduction, non-ownership and negative-interest currency. Negative interest on reserves and a physical currency that loses value with time ensure that we don’t hoard money and instead lend it out to people without, here’s the kicker, expecting it to be returned. That’s the motto of the citizens of Planet Eisenstein: to eliminate currency and bring back the system of a selfless economy.

Economic de-growth puts the brakes on our unfettered quest to conquer every Maslow hierarchy and scale new peaks without giving any thought if it’s worth our time. Thus, de-growth will allow us to work less for money and enjoy the beauty of life. Eisenstein upends every theory of economics and tries to topple every master who is perched atop, be it Malthus or Keynes or Marx. In an interview with the Dazed And Confused magazine, Eisenstein said: “People think we’re too materialistic, but I think the problem is that we’re not materialistic enough. We settle for cheap mass-produced stuff made by people in a degraded state of paid starvation at the expense of the ecosystem. Materialism to me means treating matter as sacred and making as beautiful a thing out of it as we can.”

In a world dominated by cold hard cash, it’s a stretch of the imagination to envision a sacred economy in action. But then, what’s the harm in it? If John Lennon’s Imagine can be a classic, why not at least venture out to create an economy that embodies new values like human dignity and sustainability? Eisenstein’s child-like enthusiasm to overhaul the financial system is extremely gratifying. He tries to find withering life under every unconventional stone of economics. He hits and misses but he never gives up. Even he admits the fact that he’s being “hopelessly naïve, vague and idealistic” but one can’t contend the fact that he gets a few things right. In this age of smartphones and uninhibited access to others’ personal lives, we have somehow forgotten that sharing a song or link to an article is not as altruistic as donating blood or kidney. Eisenstein wants to put the H back in humanity.

Some of the things that the author proposes in his book are straight out of Communist Manifesto. In modern-day China, that last true-blue bastion of communism of yore, no one is allowed to inherit a house after the death of their parents. That’s why we read newspaper reports that the one per cent Chinese are investing elsewhere in the world. In such circumstances, a book like Sacred Economics makes for essential reading.

This distilled elixir of Ayn Rand’s utopia in Atlas Shrugged is the backbone of this hefty book. And that happens to be its Achilles heel as well. While imagining this hybrid of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged kind of world, Eisenstein starts to sound as if the world is divided into two people: brainiacs and idiots. He thinks that people shouldn’t be working for wages. They should strive (read: work) to create something beautiful all the time. “We’re not born to just survive — we were born to contribute to the world in a way that makes use of our talents,” he says.

And his point of reference is the garbage collectors. So deluded is Eisenstein that he believes recycling waste will eliminate these “menial” jobs and people can channel their creative energy towards something more sustainable. Clearly, Eisenstein hasn’t heard of something called shadow economy. At a time when an entire layer of ancillary jobs is disappearing, be it the gas station attendant or the ticket agent at airport or employees at retail stores who would help customers find difficult-to-locate products, Eisenstein thinks we don’t need to have these jobs at all.

As long as Eisenstein’s magpie eye is focused on current economics, the book is devastatingly good. Once he starts mining the depressing but brilliant lecture that David Foster Wallace gave at the Kenyon College, Ohio, in 2005, the book turns into a rah rah manifesto for Ayn Rand fans who will lap up anything that barely resembles her utopia. That’s why this book will never eclipse the dinner table talks. After all, we all have to get suited up for the next day at work.

SACRED ECONOMICS
Charles Eisenstein
Evolver Editions
469 pages; Rs 843

In the dark

Everything that’s wrong with post-Internet movies can be seen in The Pirates of The Caribbean and the Transformers movies. These money-spinning ventures show how fluffy Hollywood flicks are turning out to be: aimed at teenagers, special effects glossing over hackneyed plots, Photoshopped people passing off as actors, being cool is the norm. If this Facebook-status size rant gets you either interested or worked up, film critic Mark Kermode’s The Good, The Bad And The Multiplex (TGTBATM) might make it to your bedside table.

Right from the standard of service at multiplexes to the decreasing influence of movie critics and the flakiness of 3-D cinema to the American disdain for foreign movies, Kermode makes sure every sacred cinematic cow is slayed between the covers of this slim paperback. He describes Michael Bay, the brain behind the Transformers franchise (personally, I’m not sure if making this garbage needs a brain), as “the reigning deity of all that is loathsome, putrid and soul destroying about modern-day blockbuster entertainment”. Nowadays Hollywood only makes two kinds of films: the larger-than-life fare that inevitably turns out to be jaw-droppingly awful or the below-the-radar stuff that can only be seen at independent film festivals like Sundance.

How have things come to such a deplorable pass? If you are someone who likes unapologetically bad movies with superb production values then you are part of the problem. In one of the six chapters, “Why Blockbusters Should Be Better”, Kermode argues that a “big” film is possible without eschewing the essential cinematic aesthetics, and his prime exhibit is Inception. Here was a smart thriller that was never “dumbed down” to pander to the sensibilities of a certain demographics, unlike expensive obscenities such as Titanic, Pearl Harbor and Avatar.

Kermode is equally dismissive about the latest practice of Hollywood studios of producing all big-budget flicks in 3-D format. In the chapter “The Inevitable Decline of 3-D”, Kermode turns into an entertaining boffin to give the reader a guided tour of the past of a medium that was never impressive and only ended up leaving a perpetual itch on the bridge of the viewer’s nose.

Equally revealing is his take on the profession of film criticism. He speaks at length about the shady practices of the studios in misquoting a critic. It's baffling to know that a review can be mangled in such a way that a review that trashed the movie is actually shown to be glowing on the DVD cover. Beware budding reviewers, next time you describe a movie as “so incredibly bad that it's good”, there are high chances it might make it to the DVD cover.

His cri de coeur that film criticism is no longer that important an art is arresting. He is very clear that, “I don’t think that critics should do the job of watching movies for you. I don’t even think they should do the job telling you which movies to watch… I think critics should do the job of watching all the movies and then telling you what they think about them in a way which is honest, engaging, erudite and entertaining.” What really gets Kermode's goat is that “for most cinema-goers in the UK, it’s blockbusters or nothing”, a phenomenon that we Indians perpetuate as well.

TGTBATM is an entertaining read because of Kermode’s LOL-provoking writing, which makes the book literally laugh-a-minute. He's so funny that if you hasten to read this book in public places, brace yourself for some baffled stares. But the humour is also the book’s biggest undoing. In a chapter in which he rants against the multiplexes he gets so carried away that he calls a multiplex staff member a “uniformed monkey”. While Kermode is an able wordsmith he tends to go overboard, which makes one wonder why his editor didn’t even make a feeble attempt to lasso his excesses.

It’s true that you need to take a small loan to afford the complete multiplex experience, but one can’t deny the fact that they have helped spawn an alternative movie-going culture. There have been a few occasions when I was allowed to watch a movie even though I was the only one in the auditorium. The burgeoning “mumblecore” movement, which is reminiscent of the Dogme 95 style of filmmaking in the US, is a sign that independent cinema might just thrive. The fact that a movie like Drive is finding a release in India shows that a multiplex is not really, to borrow a Matt Taibbi quote, “a vampire squid relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.

Another irritant in the book is that Kermode keeps reciting his impressive resume of the last 25 years. There were moments when I shouted aloud, “all right, all right, I get it that you’ve traveled half of the world and schmoozed with every movie celebrity, now can we please move on”. What’s more, he inundates the reader with random numbers about how much a movie spent and earned in return. I really wish Kermode’s gimlet eye for accuracy was toned down to turn this enjoyable book into what could have been a genre-defining book.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE MULTIPLEX
Mark Kermode
328 pages; Rs 732

Identity crisis

Imagine this: A Pakistani-American woman is in the trenches of emotional downturn because her eight-year-old relationship has come to an end, at precisely the same moment she loses her job as a lower-rung-but-destined-for-bigger-things White House official, returns to her parents and is yet to get over her boyfriend. This sure sounds like run-of-the-mill chick lit for Pakistani diaspora and is, in fact, the crux of Welcome To Americastan. But Jabeen Akhtar’s debut is not a paint-by-numbers novel, nor is her central character Samira, whose dual nationality alludes to the portmanteau in the title: Pakistan and America.

Owing to an unfortunate sequence of events, Samira finds herself at her parents’ place in Cary, North Carolina. Her father, a Pakistani immigrant who made it from rags to riches, expects his children – Samira, her elder brother Khalid and younger sister Meena – to follow his path of rectitude. This being the age of Xboxes and indefatigable texting, the kids are obviously getting debauched. The book’s most silently imposing character is the mother, who has this Mrs Dalloway-ish obsession of getting her kids married.

Akhtar’s initial masterstroke has to be her choice of Cary. Most novels about Pakistani diaspora are set in big cities like New York or London and, truth be told, barring Mohsin Hamid’s fabulous Reluctant Fundamentalist, most of these books harp on the same issue: the all-pervasive xenophobia. No wonder that is a lightning rod, but Jabeen’s novel shows that the Pakistani-Americans actually live in harmony, if you go into the bowels of US. In Welcome To Americastan the Pakistanis do not get hostile looks from the white and blend seamlessly into the society. When I met Akhtar a few days ago, she mentioned Garrison Keillor among her literary influences. Cary is more or less similar to Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon: everyone is above average. So, don’t start playing Arcade Fire’s helplessly elegiac “The Suburbs” just because the novel is set in the suburbia.
This novel is not candyfloss either. None of the characters is shallow and all are well fleshed-out. Samira’s relationship with her siblings is heartfelt and their banter is lively. There’s an undercurrent of l’esprit d’escalier (“staircase wit”) throughout the novel that helps it veer away from the obvious, on most occasions. When Samira tells an American that she’s a Pakistani, she sums up an inadvertent momentary silence that follows as, “With trained patience, I waited for him to pass through the three stages typically experiences by someone coming face-to-face with a Pakistani: first, disbelief that someone from the world’s most notorious brown country located way on the other side of the planet somehow ended up in the same room as you; next, fear and a little excitement that this Pakistani could have illicit ties to recent national and international news events; and lastly, the formulation and subsequent airing of a bone-headed comment.”

The novel is worth your time for more such penetrating insights into the lives of Pakistanis (or those from the subcontinent for that matter) living abroad. There are a few sub-plots that involve the apprehension of getting married to a beloved, catfighting, infidelity, the entire rigmarole of hooking up with someone rank unknown and even global terrorism. The author deserves to be appreciated for her storytelling sleight-of-hand for enmeshing these many themes into a coherent narrative. Even the trickiest situation is rescued by the strangely ironic humour that Jabeen manages to infuse. “For Pakistanis, everyone in the population falls into two categories — kids and parents… If you’re nineteen years old and have a husband and kid, you belong with the grown-ups. If you’re twenty-seven like me and not married-with-children, you’re in the ‘kids’ category.”

A minor bump in this otherwise rollicking ride of a novel is the reams of pages dedicated to a hideously titled association, Pakistani American Council for Political Action Committee, headed by Samira’s father and other venerable males of the community. The novel gets stagnant whenever this committee starts discussing how to make the Pakistanis an active part of American society. Another tiny bit jarring aspect of the novel is the lack of social networking and smartphone culture. No one talks about a tweet or a Facebook update, hard to digest considering how the attention span of Americans is shrinking owing to the fire hose of mindless information that is peddled as gold on these sites. But then, the reader needs to recall what Warren Buffett once said, “Internet will not change the way we chew the gum.”

Welcome To Americastan is definitely not the zeitgeist-defining novel for the American diaspora and it never intends to be so. At most, it’s chick lit for those who hate chick lit, which, make no mistake, is an achievement. And neither is the author a Jonthan Franzen-lite (the most obscure cultural reference in the novel is to Roger Waters’ personal life). Having said that, Jabeen Akhtar is one of those rare and gifted people who seem biologically incapable of doing anything that isn’t incredibly funny.

WELCOME TO AMERICASTAN
Jabeen Akhtar
Penguin
268 pages; Rs 499

'In the US, Pakistan is hot'

For almost two years Jabeen Akhtar, a Pakistani-American novelist, led a Jekyll And Hyde existence to flesh out her canter of a debut novel, Welcome to Americastan. “After my day job writing and publishing federal regulations for the US Environmental Protection Agency, I would come home and write during the evening and night. I didn’t tell anyone that I was writing this novel. I just did it,” she tells me one splendid sunny morning at the café of Mumbai’s Hotel Astoria. Eventually, she left her cushy job and gave herself a year to write a novel about a young woman in the sleepy town of Cary, North Carolina.

Why Cary? Why not Washington, DC, where she did her undergraduate and master’s degrees (at George Mason University) and worked for seven years? “There have been a lot of books talking about the immigrants living in big cities like New York and the constant ethnic tension that they live through. I wanted to write about the thousands and thousands of middle-class Pakistanis living comfortably in the suburban US,” says the 37-year-old.
Her book revolves around one such family. DC-based 27-year-old Samira returns to her parents’ home in Cary due to a series of dramatic events. What transpires over the next four months is what keeps the reader on tenterhooks. With the range of themes involved in the novel — including infidelity, defiance of parents, casual sex, homosexuality, a tinge of Muslim terrorism, catfights, hopeless romance, xenophobia, racism — it’s a mindbending task to shoehorn Welcome To Americastan into any definite genre. “How about The Reluctant Fundamentalist for Candace Bushnell fans?” I hasten to ask her. She laughs and says, “It is just a comedy. I’ll be glad if I have accurately portrayed the Pakistani lifestyle in the suburbs. I was very clear at the outset that my novel is not going to change the world.”

This novel may not be “revolutionary”, but some of its aspects may be a revelation for readers unfamiliar with its milieu. At a time when many fathers in Pakistan resort to abominations like honour killings, Samira’s parents are extremely liberal with her and her two siblings Khalid and Meena. Samira is never pushed to get married and her father, a self-made man, always asks her to concentrate on a career instead of settling for the banalities of conjugal life.

This prompted me to ask Jabeen if Samira’s trajectory is somehow inspired from her own: a job in DC, super supportive parents. “The novel is certainly inspired by people I know from close quarters, and every author’s first novel is largely autobiographical,” is her safe answer.

There’s a scene in the novel in which Samira is subjected to racism in a retail store. For a minor mistake of hers an American customer tells her, “Welcome to Americastan,” obviously ignorant of the fact that Samira is as American as she is. What is the typical American perception of a Pakistani? “Pakistan is a hot topic in the US for all the wrong reasons,” she says. “But Americans don’t know who Pakistanis are. The moment you say you are a Pakistani, you are looked at as a celebrity,” she says.

Looking at the way Pakistani youngsters have been portrayed in the novel, as more American than the Americans, I ask Akhtar whether the ABCD (American-Born Confused Desi) syndrome is on the wane. “Definitely,” she says. “The Pak Gen X is no longer confused. Owing to the Internet, the second-generation children have a firmer footing in the country now. Technology allows you to talk to anyone in any part of the world and that has gone a long way in bridging the gap between American and Pakistani youth.”

More than anything, Akhtar is chuffed to bits over the fact that she stuck to her stand instead of pandering to the American publishing industry’s stereotypes about the country. “Since [the book] was about Pakistan I was asked to make my tale ‘tragic and exotic’ and bring out the ‘ugly truths’.” As a reader, I am happy too that she didn’t let anyone mangle with a guilty pleasure that never made me feel guilty.

Boys in the hood

In its searing editorial the New Statesman magazine described the recent riots in Britain thus: “The looting was, on one level, pure nihilism; on another, it was a crude attempt by rioters to mimic the conspicuous consumption exercised by the affluent and credit-rich.”

To understand the unholy chaos that rages within the hearts of urban poor youth and how they have been disenfranchised by globalisation you can do far worse than picking up Gavin Knight’s Hood Rat.

Knight, a journalist, brings to life (and how!) his two-year experience of being embedded with police units in inner-city London, Manchester and Glasgow. He handpicked a phalanx of characters whom he encountered and documented their lives, albeit with fictional names. In Manchester, Anders Svensson, a silver-tongued detective, has taken it upon himself to rid the city of drug baron Merlin and his lieutenant Flow. The reader is witness to the harrowing and pointless life of a detective. Svensson gets his high from arrests but it dissipates soon enough when the peddler is back on the streets after successfully evading the rightful course of law.
In London, Knight’s focus shifts towards Pilgrim, a Jamaican, who immigrated to London and is well on his way to becoming the poster child of gang violence. After Pilgrim is shoved into a jail for six years, 14-year-old Troll, a Somali, takes over and his gang of miscreants continues Pilgrim’s macabre job. Then Pilgrim finishes his sentence and finds himself back in the mix. That’s when he has an epiphany — that a gangster’s sell-by date is very short. In this story, the inner-city drug abuse and the vagaries of wasted childhoods are seen at their brutal best. The Punjabi junkies in Southall represent the book’s most miserable lot. This is something Bollywood should bring to light rather than churning out trash like I- Proud To Be An Indian and Patiala House.

The third part of Knight’s sprawling triptych takes place in Glasgow, where detective chief superintendent Karyn McCluskey has lot of sweeping changes in her mind to rid the city of its embarrassing statistic: the highest murder rate in Europe. Square-eyed readers might find parallels for Merlin and flow in the characters of Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in the brilliant HBO series The Wire — there are too many coincidences to ignore. Merlin is brash like Avon while Flow has just the kind of brains that Stringer does. What McCluskey sets out to do is uncannily similar to what Major Colvin does to the kids in Baltimore. The British ghetto lingo is more or less similar to what is shown in Baltimore (the setting of The Wire). But then, be it Bradford or Baltimore, the cokeheads and druglords tend to be the same in the Western world.

Not the cops, though. It was a huge rebuke to the Metropolitan Police when British Prime Minister David Cameron asked the American supercop Bill Bratton to help overhaul a demoralised police force and to cut crime. The adage that “the police are the public and the public are the police” is seemingly forgotten these days and Hood Rat is a timely reminder. The way McCluskey tries to instill sense into the kids and stop them from taking the road to cocaine is a harbinger of hope in these desperate times. Svensson’s indefatigable attempts at handholding gangsters to a better future show that all is not lost, yet.

Hood Rat has nothing particularly new to offer to readers who are acquainted with Sudhir Venkatesh’s masterly Gang Leader for a Day and movies like This Is England and, of course, The Wire. What, however, sets Hood Rat apart is Knight’s direct and stop-you-in-your-tracks kind of writing. “These girls have bought into the image of gang life that rappers like 50 Cent or Akon present, where women are treated like princesses, driven in Aston Martinis and Playboy cigarette speedboats and bought expensive presents. But the reality isn’t like that. The reality is being chased by the police, ten men from the Tactical Support Group in visors and helmets charging in the front door of your council house at 5 a m. Being beaten, being left alone for days,” Svensson says about the vagaries of ghetto life.

Another high point of Hood Rat is its humour, which is as dry as striking two sticks to light a fire. “A twelve-year-old cannot wait to step up, shoot a general and get a reputation for himself. It’s like X Factor,” muses Svensson about the really young demographics of the criminals. This unflinching book gets so cinematic at times that you might wonder where your popcorn has gone. A few chases are so vividly described that the reader will inadvertently feel a part of the proceedings. On the flip side, the book doesn’t throw any new light on the problem of inner city crime, apart from a few terms that are limited to respective police organisations. It tends to drag at times as well. But then, it lives up to the Kafka golden rule: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” Do remember to play “Way Down In The Hole” by Tom Waits when you are peering through this eye-opening window into a world of absolutely no hope.

HOOD RAT
Gavin Knight
Picador
298 pages

Reading between the lines

Halfway through Noon, the sophomore novel by Aatish Taseer, I was almost tempted to call it a post-modern joke. Many questions were unanswered: is this the fiction equivalent of a mockumentary where the writer’s memoir masquerades as fiction? Is this novel a parlour game for the Indian and Pakistani gentry, who are supposed to read between the lines and guess who’s who in reality? Will Aatish Taseer continue to mine his own past to write fiction?

A golden rule about enjoying a work of fiction as laid down by D H Lawrence is to “trust the novel, not the novelist”. Fair enough. It’s common knowledge that at some level every writer generously pilfers from his or her personal experiences. But Noon is cut with a different cloth: Taseer talks about his parents through Rehan Tabassum, a love child of Udaya Singh and Sahil Tabassum. Taseer had a not-so-idyllic childhood because his father Salman Taseer, a Pakistani politician who was assassinated earlier this year, never displayed any fatherly affection towards him. Rehan, too, has to deal with his father’s absence after Sahil deserts Udaya in London in the mid-80s.

I could have ignored these obvious similarities with Taseer’s personal life if Noon had been fiendishly compelling, which it mostly isn’t. Instead of exploring themes in some depth, the novel provides fleeting glimpses into various stages of young Rehan’s life. Right from his childhood in Delhi where an adoring grandmother takes care of him to a stint at his stepfather’s farmhouse to a visit to Sahil’s place in Pakistan, Taseer’s sharp gaze never overstays its welcome. Noon could be called a daring piece of fiction in as much as the writer chooses to leave many loose ends.
The slim novel also packs in myriad side-characters with brief, walk-on parts of little consequence: a typical single mother who is overprotective about her son, a gay uncle and his toy boy, a step-brother who ascribes his transgressions to his father’s overbearing presence, a Rajamata steeped in colonial delusions of grandeur, a step-father who is desperate to gain entrance into the noble class, a servant desperate to prove his loyalty under trying circumstances. Taseer needs to be commended for his portrayal of human foibles. Every character is inherently self-righteous but it’s their mean side, which also happens to be more human, that shines through.

For instance, Rehan imagines what might happen if his servant Kalyan is convicted of theft, a thought that coincides with the arrival of Kalyan’s family at the farmhouse: “I had to stop myself from thinking of their (the family) disappointment and fear on that same Uttarakhand Roadways bus, heavy with the smell of diesel, coiling its way back through unlit mountain roads to the place from where it came… I thought, if India was the sort of country where college essays were written about such things, Kalyan’s son might grow up to write one about this visit to the capital… And where would I be in such an essay? A small player in the background, a figure of fun perhaps, denied even the dignity of a villain.”

I got my Jonathan Franzen rush when Rehan muses about his ambivalent relationship with Sahil: “We had blood and almost nothing else in common.” Taseer’s charming disdain for the schmooze fests is apparent, “And like this, the diplomatic circle closed around Mahapatra, bringing an atmosphere of great cheer and congeniality to the recently moribund gathering.” Rehan reflects Taseer’s sensitive side: “Servants didn’t have birthdays or zodiac signs; their age and the places they had lived and grown up in didn’t matter.”

Sadly, Taseer’s canvas is way too big and he crumbles under the weight of it. The journalist in him (he worked for Time and Prospect magazines) probably tempts him to weave many events into the narrative – the Kashmir earthquake, London bombings, Musharraf’s presidency – without really adding any value to it. His understanding of the new India is more or less generic. Here’s a description of his stepfather’s obsession with technology, “wireless Internet, a modern gym, flat screens and DVD players, Tata Sky and dark-brown plug points capable of taking the plugs of the world.” Taseer describes a loyal employee as “the most bendable unbending man I ever knew!”. There are more such vapid descriptions that help Noon’s abstract plot progress roughly at the same pace as a glacier.

V S Naipaul hailed Taseer as “a young writer to watch”. That endorsement should have come from anyone but Sir Vidia. After all, early in his career he rejected Trinidad as a viable creative place and decided to “withdraw completely from nationality and loyalties except to persons”. His corpulent work has a girth that extends from Gabon to India. It might not merit a comparison here but both Taseer’s novels (The Temple-Goers was set in Delhi) are set more or less in his comfort zone — England, India and Pakistan. While that’s no crime, Taseer should withdraw from his narcissistic navel-gazing self and attempt something different.

It’s said that everyone has one book in him or her, and if that’s true Taseer has done that. Let’s hope that from now on he puts wonderful writing talent to better use.

NOON
Aatish Taseer
Fourth Estate
238 pages

Lethal moves

It’s a fool’s task to try to make sense of Bobby Fischer, the man who juxtaposed weird and wondrous like no one else. He was and remains the youngest ever US chess champion, and in 1972 he did what was thought impossible: he ended the Soviet Union’s 24-year stranglehold on the World Chess Championship. After that, he descended into what appears to have been a bottomless pit of anti-Semitism and mindless fulmination against the world. A biography by Frank Brady, Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall, and an HBO documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World, flesh out this enigmatic figure.

With his credentials — he was founding editor of Chess Life magazine and deeply involved with the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, where Fischer hung out as a youngster — Brady is au fait with every cobble along Fischer’s path as he went, to quote the second half of the book’s subtitle, “From America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness”.

Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943 to Regina (Jewish) and Hans-Gerhardt Fischer (non-Jewish). His penchant for chess became apparent at age six: he would analyse chess games and try to replicate them in his own game. With constant self-training, Fischer scaled peak after new peak and grew increasingly unbeatable. An early triumph of Brady’s biography is a beautifully written description of the 13-year-old Fischer’s game against Donald Byrne, a former US champion, at an invitational tournament.

In describing this game, dubbed “the game of the century”, Brady's prose so effectively rises to the occasion that one begins to imagine a cross between Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway. These four pages will gain a death grip on the reader.

But this nearly flawless book has one dark spot: the Cold War-era Boris Spassky-versus-Bobby Fischer duel in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972. Brady gives it plenty of colour but does not offer a fly-on-the-wall account of the game. That void is filled by the HBO documentary, which gives a blow-by-blow account of the game, with insight into all the machinations and diplomatic wrangling, and Fischer’s clever brinkmanship. Just before the match was to begin, Fischer made many complaints, about everything from the location to the prize money.

* * * * *

For a better understanding of Fischer, one needs to know that when it came to money, Fischer could make Ebenezer Scrooge look open-handed. At one point it looked as if the Spassky-Fischer duel would never see the light of the day, thanks to Fischer’s incredibly petty financial objections. What put it back on track was an intervention from Henry Kissinger, no less.

Bobby Fischer Against the World, the documentary film, uses talking heads throughout rather than a running voiceover. Its portrayal of the Spassky-Fischer match is a cinematic tour-de-force. Director Liz Garbus’s use of archival footage will put cinéma vérité techniques to shame.

In his biography, Brady revels in describing the aftermath of that iconic duel. What has up to this point read like a hagiography suddenly shows signs of turning into a hatchet job. Here, as the book tells it, was a shy, unassuming, reclusive, well-mannered young man who suddenly morphed into a colossal egotist — eccentric, inconsiderate and intransigent.

After the Reykjavik match, Fischer spent two decades — widely known as the Wilderness Years — immured in a room not much larger than a chessboard, in Pasadena, California. He devoured anti-Semitic literature and made venomous statements about Jews. The floodgates really opened when Fischer defied a US embargo on Yugoslavia in 1992, imposed because of the ethnic war there, to participate in a rematch of the 1972 classic. What’s more, he spat on the official US letter that informed him about the conditions of the embargo. Ultimately he had to give up his American citizenship. What followed was a quixotic, peripatetic lifestyle.

Ever more convinced of (non-existent) Israeli and Russian conspiracies, Fischer turned into a paranoiac. He developed outlandish, even deranged fears: he suspected the Soviets could affect his mind by sending radio signals through the metal in his teeth; he feared a KGB assassination plot. He grew more unhinged with time. Just after 9/11, while America reeled from the most lethal terrorist attack in modern history, Fischer’s schadenfreude towards his former nation excited only repulsion: “Cry, you crybabies!” he said. “Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming.”

The best thing about Brady’s book is that he realises that Fischer’s genius and his mental illness were closely connected. That is why Brady never expresses his opinion of Fischer, even though he is well acquainted with his subject. Brady also depicts Fischer’s final three years in Reykjavik well. From Fischer’s daily routine to his reading predilections, Brady gets the details and presentation right. If ever a course is taught on how to write warts-and-all biography, Brady’s unflinching book should be at the heart of the curriculum.

Why is Islamophobia okay?

Recently, fashion designer John Galliano and film-maker Lars von Trier faced a lot of opprobrium for their anti-Semitic rants. Galliano’s drunken remarks at a Parisian pub got him sacked from Christian Dior and Lars von Trier was banned from the Cannes Film Festival. In this age of social networking and reduced attention spans, is anti-Semitism really that important a stand? In his book The Freedom To Be Racist?, writer Erik Bleich says: “There are people who hold anti-Semitic views, but they generally don’t hold them intensely. They don’t fear that Jews are going to threaten their livelihood or culture or any of the things that people truly worry about.”

Still, anti-Semitism is somehow deemed equal to anti-humanity. That begs a question that why is Islamophobia allowed to thrive? Dutch politician Geert Wilders is furthering his political ambitions not by any brilliant reforms but through his unbridled hatred for Islam. So much so that he called Koran a “fascist book”, which should be banned in the Netherlands, like Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And Wilders got away with his rant because it didn’t deal with Jews.

Muslims are being oppressed in various ways. In her novel Welcome To Americastan, Jabeen Akhtar mentions how the FBI Terror Watch list contains “names of two-year-old kids. Names of dead people. People complaining about finding their names on the list and not knowing how they got on there”. That constant fear among Muslims is getting more and more visceral. We hear stories about Muslims shaving off their long beards and having cropped hair to assimilate with others and not raise any ‘suspicion’. The Western world is turning into a liberal Taliban if its constant raiding of madrasas and banning of burkhas is any indication. So ruthless is the stereotyping that the first image that strikes of any venerable looking man in long beard and skull cap is that maybe he spends half of his time in the Tora Bora caves. The recent tenth-anniversary of 9/11 was a huge slap on the extremists’ face, thanks to gunning down of Osama. However, the slap could have been tighter if only The Cordoba House project was okayed.

Last year, when a 13-floor Islamic center was proposed to be built three blocks away from Ground Zero, the 9/11 venue, there was an unprecedented hue and cry. In his piece for Financial Times, Basharat Peer wrote, “The Cordoba House project will be a venue for reconciliation between Islam and the west, delivering a powerful rebuttal to the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the trade towers; opponents call it an offence to the memory of those who died in 2001.” Finally, the project was scrapped.

Don’t think I’m being insensitive towards the Jews. It pains me to no end when someone compares a crowded Mumbai local train ride to a concentration camp. The sheer facetiousness makes me cringe. But then if you go to the same Parisian pub where Galliano was indicted and add any number of expletives preceding the word Muslim, you’ll still be fine. After all, those one per cent of Muslims who are mindless enough to blow themselves up subsume the other 99 per cent.