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The Insularity of American Literature
Check out this essay by Anis Shivani on what is wrong with American literature. Sure, lots of red meat here, and one can always poke holes in his thesis: isn’t there a super great writer X that Shivani is overlooking? But that objection may well reinforce Shivani’s point, which I take to be meaningful in the sense of a statement like “Outsiders find rural Bihar rough to travel through”, and citing a comfortable itinerary does not negate the qualitative truth of the statement. 🙂 In any case, I think it is decent food for thought. Enjoy.
“There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world…not the United States,” Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently said. “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature…That ignorance is restraining.” … Engdahl couldn’t be more correct. We are too insular. We specialize in quantity, not quality. Our publishing model, like that of the lapsed auto industry, is a failed one. It survives only because of our gigantism–mere volume is sufficient to ensure a certain amount of financial success, but it is not producing a worthwhile cultural product. Just as we might have 500 television channels but not one will ever offer the challenging movies of Buñuel or Godard, or a Wagner opera, we might produce 175,000 books a year, but quality is elusive. What we’re talking about is a business model that is outdated, cannot keep up with globalization. There ought to be no bail-out of American writers. It is a case of market monopoly run amok, taking self-publicity for truth.
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BBC Documentary on Gandhi
A three-hour BBC documentary on Gandhi (2009) is now on YouTube. It does a reasonable job of covering Gandhi’s life: basic biographical details, historical events, key influences, lucky breaks, setbacks, etc. Based on mainstream scholarship, it avoids many notable controversies and critiques while still conveying a sense of this immensely bold, complex, and strangely charismatic man who, despite his significant flaws, errors of judgment, and idiosyncrasies, still captivates people worldwide and has become an icon for non-violent resistance. It includes some rare historical footage as well.
Click here to watch all video clips consecutively on YouTube. The three episodes are: The Making of the Mahatma, The Rise to Fame, and The Road to Freedom. (Whoever posted the video has curiously inserted “British Propaganda” in the name! Is that merited you think?)
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The Absence of Ambedkar
Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of Open Magazine, has a good essay in 3QD. Here is an excerpt:
One of the arguments I have heard over and over again explaining the success of Indian democracy is the invocation of a civilizational ethos, our tolerance, the claim goes, is rooted in the traditions of Hinduism. While it is not entirely untrue, this idea is given too much credit. The dailts are a huge counterargument, tolerance for oppression is as much a part of Hinduism as a tolerance of other faiths.If today revolutionary groups such as the Maoists seek recruits and fail to find them in large numbers among the untouchables it is largely because of Ambedkar. At the same time Ambedkar as much as Nehru is responsible for the calm rationalism of the Indian Constitution. Gandhi lends himself to every new age anti-science fad, Ambedkar is one of our key antidotes. Far more than the Ganga or Gandhi, if writers and academics needs to make sense of India they need to spend time on Ambedkar.
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The Leatherbacks of Trinidad
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
Grande Riviere, a tiny village on the northeastern coast of Trinidad, is one of the few beaches in the world where the leatherback turtle comes to nest. It lies near the end of a serpentine road that hugs the palm-fringed Atlantic coast for miles, then cuts through the lush rainforest of the Northern Range. A river, for which the village is named, and the rainforest—abuzz with the sound of crickets and birds—tumble onto its Caribbean sands, giving the place a remote and sensual air.
Cacao plantations once flourished here but the few hundred people of Grande Riviere now rely on fishing and ecotourism. All three or four of its pricey tourist lodges are near the beach; a village bar, a couple of provision stores and eateries, and a post office are on the main road further behind. The star attraction, and the primary reason for our visit last month, is clearly the leatherback.
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On Amitav Ghosh
A new interview with writer Amitav Ghosh has appeared in Guernica magazine. Parts of it reminded me of a saying by Plutarch: “It isn’t always in the most distinguished achievements that men’s virtues or vices may be best discovered: but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battle.” The interview, between the lines, sheds light on Ghosh’s India, the audience he addresses, and his social vantage point. Consider his claim:“People often talk about identity. It’s not one of the things which really is washing about in my head at all. One of the reasons why is because anybody who’s lived in India knows that India is incredibly, incredibly diverse.… That’s one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be.”
Umm, really? Or is that the privilege of a tiny social class—his own? Ghosh laments that lit critics in America “think primarily about identity … I mean from the age of like fourteen onwards when they first read Catcher in the Rye or whatever, they’re taught that that’s what literature is about. So that’s what they think it’s about.” Really? A novelist—and former social anthropologist—scoffing at the lens of identity in understanding the lives of others?
Categories: Books & Authors -
Göbekli Tepe
According to the dominant scholarly view of pre-history today, our human ancestors were once nomadic hunter-gatherers, with many recognizable religio-cultural practices like burying of their dead, wearing bone and stone jewelry, and even creating cave art and figurines. What followed, in more or less this order, was agriculture and domestication of animals, permanent settlements, pottery and metallurgy, the rise of cities, specialized crafts and trade guilds, social hierarchies, organized religion and monumental architecture, and eventually money, writing, and the alphabet.However, at a site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, a monumental temple built ~11,600 years ago by hunter-gatherers suggests that at least here, organized religion preceded the rise of agriculture and many other aspects of civilization. In recent years, Göbekli Tepe has cast serious doubt on many established theories about our pre-history.
… the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
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The Tribes of the Deccan
Here is a documentary based on the footage gathered by Austrian anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf on the hill tribes of the Deccan in the 1940s (archive). This includes the tribes of the Chenchus, the Reddis, the Koyas, the Bondos, the Gadabas, and more. It may well be the only visual record of these groups from that period—their rituals, hunts, dances, foods, marriage ceremonies, material life, and more. It is revealing too of anthropology from another era, with notions and judgments that seem positively quaint and superficial by today’s standards. Note, for instance, the force and frequency of words like “primitive” and “civilized”, and the need to delineate borders between them. I don’t know much more about Fürer-Haimendorf beyond what is on wikipedia, but this is nevertheless a valuable historical record. The film was made in the 1960s and narrated by a 30-something rising star at the BBC named David Attenborough.
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Fukuyama on Political Order
Nicholas Wade has an interesting review of Francis Fukuyama’s new book, The Origins of Political Order. I must admit that I have not had a particularly favorable opinion of Fukuyama as a scholar, colored no doubt by his neo-con politics. However, this ambitious book seems to me worth a read and I’ve just acquired it. Here is an excerpt from Wade’s review:
Dr. Fukuyama, a political scientist, is concerned mostly with the cultural, not biological, aspects of human society. But he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution.
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What’s Left of the Left
An engaging biographical sketch of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, including his political and economic vision, views of Obama, personal values, quirks of character, blind spots, etc. Alongside, it also sheds light on how many liberals like him responded to the major economic events of recent years.Krugman has been building, in his columns and on his blog, not just a critique of [the Obama] presidency but something grander and more expansively detailed, something closer to an alternate architecture for what Obamaism might be. The project has remade Krugman’s public image, as if he had spent years becoming a chemically isolate form of himself—first a moderate, then an anti-Bush partisan, and now the leading exponent of a kind of liberal purism against which the compromises of the White House might be judged. Krugman’s counterfactual Obama would have provided far more stimulus money and would have nationalized Citigroup and Bank of America. He would have written off Republicans and worked only with Democrats to fashion a health-care reform bill that included a so-called public option. The president of Krugman’s dreams would have made his singular long-term goal the preservation of the welfare state and the middle-class society it was designed to create.
This purism is not a role Krugman is altogether comfortable with, but it is one he has sought: His blog is titled The Conscience of a Liberal. He uses it as a kind of workroom for his column, and it is now, according to Technorati, the most popular single-author blog online … The comment section has become a repository for a certain form of liberal anguish, and a community unto itself: “His campaign promised a better, more equitable America. Those who believed him feel betrayed,” wrote one commenter in regard to a recent column titled “The President Is Missing.”And another: “Come on, Professor Krugman, will you lead the people out?”
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Debate in Tibetan Buddhism
Have you heard of the 900+ years old debating tradition of Tibet? In 2005, I saw many examples of it in Dharamsala. Though fascinating to watch, their nuances were lost on me since they took place in Tibetan. This Asia Society video (1 hr, 42 mins) begins with an introduction by Daniel Perdue, showcases four debating Tibetan monks, includes an excellent lecture by Geshe Thupten Jinpa (the star attraction), presents a sample debate between Perdue and Jinpa in English, and ends with an engaging Q&A. Here is Perdue’s intro to the tradition:
Since the time of the early Buddhist kings, Tibet has enjoyed a rich history of philosophical enquiry … Buddhism is a “wisdom tradition,” meaning that it is based on the realizations or insights of the historical Buddha and that it holds that all suffering and even the suffering of death are related to a failure of wisdom. They hold that one is freed by wisdom, by seeing the nature of things. Philosophical debate is part of this effort … The central purposes of Tibetan monastic debate are to defeat misconceptions, to establish a defensible view, and to clear away objections to that view. [The point of debate is] to understand the nature of reality through careful analysis of the state of existence of ordinary phenomena, the basis of reality. (Read more)
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A Letter from an IITian
When I came to IIT Kharagpur in 1985, I saw it as my big achievement. Most people I knew saw my All India Rank of 190 as a reward for my academic merit and hard work, and bestowed on me enough awe and respect to embarrass a minor god. I had prevailed in what everyone believed to be an open, fair, and tough competition, for which I — Namit Arora — deserved all the thunder and applause.This is still how most people see it but I now have my doubts. If I am honest with myself, I can’t really take credit for it. I suspect that much of my achievement was not of my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being at the right place at the right time. I came to this view after reflecting on the three implicit claims that attribute it to my own achievement: (a) my performance in a fair competition (b) my academic merit (c) my drive and hard work.
Consider the first claim: Is it true that the IIT-JEE is a fair competition? Can anyone compete and win? Or is the game strongly rigged to favor some over others, based on socioeconomic factors that are arbitrary and derive from accidents of birth? India lacks equality of opportunity due to many disadvantages, for e.g., of family income, social class, gender, caste, language, etc. So the runners on the racetrack to the IIT don’t begin at the same starting point. What does it mean to say that the first to cross the finish line deserve their wins?
Categories: Philosophy -
Atheism, Ethics, and Pornography
An interview with Nina Hartley, humanist, proud atheist, vocal feminist, and a pornstar with 600+ adult films to her credit:
The Humanist: What do you think could be done to improve the [porn] industry?NH: The widespread notion that legal porn production is a sink hole of abuse and coercion that takes advantage of poor, innocent women, is the biggest smack leveled against the business. It’s almost entirely a function or projection of people’s fears and discomfort about women, gender relations, sex, sexuality and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The idea that a woman could choose, on purpose, to perform in pornographic videos for her own reasons still goes deeply against the notion that women are somehow victims of male sexuality, that they’re delicate flowers who need the protection of a good man, or the law.
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Vacation Break
We’re off to Trinidad and Tobago. There may be no new posts for at least a couple of weeks.
The islands of T&T, by Caribbean standards, are a tourist backwater. This despite the fact that Trinidad has a unique natural history. It was once a part of the South American mainland, which has endowed it with the greatest biological diversity of any Caribbean island. Both islands harbor old growth rainforest and unspoiled beaches.Centuries of colonialism saw the islands’ indigenous populations almost entirely wiped out and then replaced first with Africans, brought as slaves, and later with indentured laborers brought mostly from India. Today, Trinidad has perhaps the most cosmopolitan population in the Caribbean, with about 40% claiming African heritage, 40% Indian heritage, and most of the remaining 20% claiming mixed ancestry, also including French, Spanish, British, Chinese, Syrian, and Amerindian. Tobago, on the other hand, had a separate history, which never included the importation of indentured labor, and the population of that island remains almost entirely of African descent, with strong French influences. This cultural diversity is evident in the islands’ music, food, religions, festivals, languages, pop culture, and more.
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How Language Shapes Thought
“Do the structure of particular languages affect the way we attend to, encode, represent, remember, and reason about the world?” I have featured this phenomenally interesting topic many times on this blog (see Enfield, Boroditsky, Knobe and Boroditsky, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o). The implications of this research are huge. I strongly recommend this brilliant, action-packed lecture by Lera Boroditsky (1:40 hrs), whose major experimental research findings, in her own words, can be summarized as follows:
- People who speak different languages think differently.
- Many aspects of language shape thinking: grammar, lexicon, orthography…
- Language meddles in even low-level perceptual decisions.
- Learning new languages can change the way you think.
- Sometimes, people think differently when speaking different languages.
- In bilinguals, both languages are at least somewhat active.
- Learning a new language can change the way you speak your native language.
- Each language provides its own cognitive toolkit, [and] encapsulates the knowledge and world view developed over thousands of years within a culture.
In short, “languages really shape how we construct reality”. Wow, didn’t Nagarjuna get it right (and so did Wittgenstein, from a different philosophical lineage nearly 1800 years later)!
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Lelyveld’s Gandhi
In the NYRB, Anita Desai reviews Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.
Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.
…One might think that Gandhi’s legacy on the whole has been depicted negatively [by Lelyveld] and yet there is no denying Lelyveld’s deep sympathy with the man. The picture that emerges is of someone intensely human, with all the defects and weaknesses that suggests, but also a visionary with a profound social conscience and courage who gave the world a model for nonviolent revolution that is still inspiring. It was a model for revolution both on the vast political level and on the personal and domestic one: nothing was unimportant in Gandhi’s eyes, and nothing impossible. He set an almost impossibly high standard and struggled personally to meet it. So if it is all seen as ending in tragedy, it was, Lelyveld writes,
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Social Mobility in America
I came across a fairly detailed study on social mobility that shows that despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, social mobility remains unusually poor in the United States. Some non-contiguous excerpts:
The United States has long been known as the land of opportunity, where hard work is rewarded and economic prosperity is within reach for all … our national faith in this proposition is on the rise … While few would deny that it is possible to start poor and end rich, the evidence suggests that this feat is more difficult to accomplish in the United States than in other high-income nations…. In sum, the intergenerational findings paint a portrait of a society in which family background matters a great deal, and matters for reasons that many people find unjust. Our national commitment to equality of opportunity requires that we take these statistics seriously, gain a better understanding of the mechanisms at work and work towards policies that will allow all Americans to reach their full economic potential.The key findings relating to intergenerational mobility include the following:
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The Ugliness of the Indian Cricket Fan?
In Mohali, where India played Pakistan in the recently concluded World Cup, Gautam Gambhir declared, “For me, the world cup win will be dedicated to the people who lost their lives in the 26/11 massacre” (committed by Pakistani terrorists). Beating this team from Pakistan, he implied, would help calm the souls of the victims on 26/11. Individuals make inflamatory remarks all the time. A far bigger problem in this case was the lack of any mainstream media criticism of his remark in India (though it riled the visitors). The Indian press reported Gambhir’s “patriotism” with a mix of glee and admiration.
A relatively minor episode, yet suggestive of the kind of stuff too many Indian cricket fans and the media are now blind to. This is not just in cricket but reflects a wider mindset. When Abhinav Bindra won the first ever individual Olympic gold for India in 2008, his joyous father, a wealthy businessman, boasted to his joy filled Indian fans how he spotted his son’s talent when Abhinav was 5 years old: “He kept a water balloon on our maid’s head and began shooting, knowing little that a slight mistake could have proved fatal. But his aim was so perfect that I couldn’t think about anything else but make him a pro.” If this is not depraved, I don’t know what is. The press and the fans not only glossed over the Bindras’ use of the maid for target practice, but many cited it to emphasize just how awesome their hero really was!
Here is some food for thought from Uday Chandra on his blog, Musings of an Argumentative Indian: -
India: A Wealth Report
Much has been written about the rising wealth and prosperity of Indians. All kinds of cliches are in use, devised by the likes of Thomas Friedman. But just how rich are the Indians today? What is the distribution of wealth in India among its 1.2 billion citizens? What is considered rich? What is the income range of middle class households? Here are some statistics from a recent survey that was written up in Open Magazine.- “Rich” households
$35,000+ per year: 1.3% (16 million people) - “Middle-class” households
$8,000 to $35,000 per year: 13% (160 million) - “Aspiring middle-class” households
$3,500 to $8,000 per year: 30% (359 million) - “Deprived” households
Below $3,500 per year: 57% (684 million)
I wish there had been another category of “Severely deprived” households comprising, say, the bottom 300 million people. I bet the household income there is below $800 per year (~$2/day).
About 170,000 people, or 0.01%, have a net-worth over $1 million. Of these, 25 are dollar billionaires. Read the rest of the report here.
Categories: Economics - “Rich” households
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What Do We Deserve?
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. This essay also appeared in the Humanist, May/Jun 2011, and was included in three college anthologies in the U.S. from Sage Publications, McGraw-Hill, and Bedford/St. Martin’s, and a fourth anthology forthcoming in Sept, 2013.)
I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, ‘call no man happy until he is dead’, I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to an Indian Institute of Technology, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being at the right place at the right time.
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Songs of Kabir
A new translation of poems by Kabir, the great 15th century Sufi poet from India, is due out on 5th April. “Transcending divisions of creed, challenging social distinctions of all sorts, and celebrating individual unity with the divine, the poetry of Kabir is one of passion and paradox, of mind-bending riddles and exultant riffs. These new translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of India’s finest contemporary poets, bring out the richness, wit, and power of a literary and spiritual master.” Below is a sample (a few more poems from this volume have appeared in Poetry Magazine):
Except That It Robs You of Who You AreExcept that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you.
Speak with a wise man, there’ll be
Much to learn; speak with a fool,
All you get is prattle.
Strike a half-empty pot, and it’ll make
A loud sound; strike one that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.
