The paint job is sloppy. Blotches of paint invade the boundaries of the hand-made signs, creating ruins of rectangles. And then there’s that distinctive smell, a smell unlike any other, the smell of Hyderabad’s airport — distant relative of the smell of the airport in Bombay.

We’re out and about. I look outside of the window of the ambassador, and see the driver of an autorickshaw looking pensively at his handle-bars and I wish I had my camera with me. But I don’t like taking photographs of random people engaged in their daily activities. Makes me feel like I’m intruding. I’ll have to figure that one out.

Later, I’m reading a newspaper and on the business page there’s a tiny little ad with the photograph of a young but obese woman. She has kidney disease and needs a transplant. It costs Rs. 5,00,000 and her father simply can’t afford the sum. He takes out an ad in the paper — on the business page — asking for donations from kind-hearted individuals. And most people in India still live on less than a dollar a day. Beneath the fold in another daily, there is an advertisement from the Ministry of Chemicals & Fertilizers* — fertilizers are in abundance in India. I wonder who the ad is supposed to be reassuring. Every month, dozens of farmers commit suicide in Andhra Pradesh because they’re unable to support themselves and their families. Dozens more all over India.

Here, in Hyderabad’s Old City, beggars make housecalls every afternoon, standing outside the gate of the house until someone gives them money or shoos them away.

After school, children play cricket or football in the street outside the house making a lot of noise. I’m trying to take a nap and their ruckus wakes me up. I look outside, see them playing in their blue uniforms, and I go back to sleep. The next day my grandfather tells them to go play elsewhere, this isn’t a playground.

The media is all over the Left’s opposition to Congress’s increasing ties with the U.S. The Left is rejecting a new nuclear cooperation deal that requires India to buy into the Washington consensus on Iran in return of recognition (of India being a stable and responsible nuclear power) and other benefits. Congress needs the Left’s support in parliament.

Most signs are still hand-painted. But the Telugu Desam Party and the BJP have sharp, shiny signs printed out and placed outside their offices in various parts of the Old City. The BJP, tellingly, has no Urdu on its signs — just Telugu and English. The TDP has all three. There’s a CPI(M) office (or something) somewhere near Charminar but I saw that two years ago and don’t know where it is now.

But I’m here for a couple of weddings. The last two out of the ten of my mother’s siblings to get married. Not my turn, not yet. I realize that I inhabit a completely different moral universe. More on that later, perhaps.

* Earlier I wrote that the ad was provided by the Ministry of Agriculture. That’s not correct. Apparently, India has an entire ministry dedicated to chemicals and fertilizers.

China’s cheap exports have come under increasing scrutiny recently, particularly in the Canadian press, after a string of dangerous products were recalled. First, there was the case of the tainted toothpaste, sold in low-cost stores (like dollar stores) as reputable brands like Colgate. Then, there was a case of tainted pet food (and soon enough, people food). And, most recently, a case of excessive lead paint in several toys — this is something that effects my family personally, as I’m sure it does millions across the world.

There’s a lot of obfuscation going on in what, exactly, the Canadian media is saying and how it’s saying it. Let’s peek through this using one of Linwood Barclay’s pieces in The Star, “Quality control that’s made in China.” (Barclay is supposed to be a humourist, but I’ve never found any of his columns to be even remotely funny. They’re not intelligent enough to be scathing pieces of satire, either. Ultimately they’re just sophomoric attempts at humour.) The article takes the form of a multiple choice test those applying to become Quality Control Inspectors have to take.

Obfuscation One: Intellectual Property

4. What should China do about the fact that Canada’s Customs Act does not make it illegal to import or distribute goods known to be counterfeit?

a) as sign of gratitude, put “highly flammable” stickers on substandard extension cords.

b) give Canada a cut-rate on shrimps left out in the sun too long.

c) is this a trick question?

Barclay conflates counterfeiting with safety. Let’s be clear about this, just because something is counterfeit does not mean it’s unsafe. As a matter of fact, the tainted toys I mentioned above are produced by Mattel (and its Fisher-Price line) — Poison Me Elmo. It’s also known that Bayer, the big pharmaceutical corporation, exported HIV-tainted medicine to Latin America and Asia with full knowledge in the mid-1980s. Other pharmaceutical companies, like Eli Lilly, suppressed data that indicated that drugs, like Prozac, can cause adverse side effects. The CEOs aren’t executed or even jailed — most cases aren’t even brought to trial because this big pharmaceutical companies either settle out of court or buy members of the legal profession.

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I’m watching an infomercial on an Indian satellite channel for “English GURU” — some kind of program that teaches you English. The ad is kind of surreal. The ‘master-ji’ (with flat cap, spectacles, Marx-like beard and tweed suit) says that English is not just a desirable language, but a desirable lifestyle. It dictates (positively, I reckon) how you walk, talk, sit, get up, eat, etc. In fact, he stresses that one should think in English. The narrator then says that, in an age of globalization, multinationals, call-centres, etc. are hiring solely on the basis of whether or not one speaks English. Master-ji keeps reappearing, and later he speaks in thick Hindi (which I can’t understand) expounding on the virtues of learning English.

Adorno once wrote that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This statement is part of a broader focus of Adorno’s, and that of other social theorists and artists, to come to grips with the sheer horror of the Holocaust and modern suffering. Is it right, is it meaningful for art to exist after humanity’s witnessed such massive suffering? Recently, I came across a paper where the author wonders how we can make sense of reality itself after the cruelty of the Holocaust/Auschwitz. Adorno later said that suffering has a right to be expressed, and to be expressed through art.

There’s also the common refrain, if it weren’t for intervention in the world wars, “we would all be speaking German right now.” Throughout my pre-university schooling, on every 11th of November (or close to it), the school would organize ceremonies for Remembrance Day. “On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” the first world war ended, and so we commemorate the sacrifices of those who died defending our freedom.

I remember being wholly skeptical of the whole affair. I knew, see, that the British occupied South Asia until 1947. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be remembering, exactly, on Remembrance Day.

Of course, I speak English. India has the world’s largest English-speaking population. There are more Francophones outside of France than inside it, not in Quebec, but in Africa. So what’s German to us? What’s German fascism to us, when, as Césaire forcefully lays out, the techniques and methods of fascism were first practised on those colonized — the wretched of the earth — by those same, self-styled defenders of freedom and democracy?

And what is Adorno’s statement if not hubristic and self-absorbed? Was poetry not barbaric after the Belgians slaughtered up to 10 million people in the Congo at the turn of the century? Was poetry not barbaric after millions were enslaved and transported in great ships like cattle, when millions died at the bayonets of the European colonizers? If poetry is to be barbaric, it was barbaric long before the Holocaust.

The kind of barbarism perfected at Auschwitz, after all, wasn’t invented by German fascists.

In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. received the Nobel peace prize.

In an interview with Claude Lewis, Malcolm said, “He got the peace prize, we got the problem…. If I’m following a general, and he’s leading me into a battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards, or awards, I get suspicious of him. Especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over.”

Whatever one thinks of MLK, I think it’s important for us to be skeptical of the so-called “peace” prize. If people like Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin — who have done more to entrench the oppression of the Palestinians than most people — can receive the Nobel peace prize then you know it doesn’t mean much. Or, that it rarely means anything. In fact, the peace prize was given to them precisely because it was about “peace” — Oslo was all about “peace” — not about justice. And there can never be any peace until there is first justice, unless that peace is enforced at the barrel of a gun (and, in the case of Israel, with an apartheid wall). If Kofi Annan, that lapdog of imperialism, can win the peace prize, if Bill Clinton can be considered for a peace prize, if Ariel Sharon can be considered a “man of peace” then the word “peace” has no meaning.

Besides, a bunch of rich white guys toasting each other over fine food and fine wine to decide who will be this year’s cause célèbre is not in any way acknowledging the difficult and dangerous work of thousands of activists. “Non-violence” becomes a universal principle rather than a tactical decision. The Nobel committee simply perpetuates structural inequality rather than doing anything to really, actually change anything. Mandela and FW de Clerk (a notorious practitioner of apartheid who decided to ‘end’ it when it suited opportunism) get the peace prize. But we see that little justice, little actual change has taken place in South Africa in terms of the unequal distribution of resources and wealth that still corresponds largely to race.

Here, then, we see that several Nobel prize winners (not just peace prize winners), led by Elie Wiesel, have signed a statement condemning recent moves by British unions to boycott Israel’s apartheid.

They got the prizes, we got the problems.

Sometimes a song you haven’t heard in ages just pops into your head out of nowhere. That’s what happened to me. I could only recall a few lyrics, inaccurately, which made searching for the song a pain. But I finally found it, and have been listening to it nonstop since then:

The lyrics aren’t exactly remarkable, but the song is so melodious and catchy. Also, Jackie Shroff is, as always, so dashing. I like it very much. I recall seeing the film, Aaina (Mirror), when I was younger — but don’t remember much about it. Another one of the songs, Dil ne dil se kya kaha, was also quite popular (perhaps more popular than this one). It’s also a really good song:

Despite being full of the typical running-through-meadows-and-hills, the video stands out for the most hilarious (quasi-sensual) chest thumping I’ve seen outside of basketball games (at 00:25, or -3:12). Definitely not to be missed.

In my last academic year (2006-2007), I took a course on aesthetics and politics at UofT, Marxism and Form (VIC401, based on the book of the same title by Fredric Jameson), taught by Eric Cazdyn. Taking the course was one of the more intelligent moves I made while at UofT. It was a graduate seminar and I had absolutely no idea what I was in for: it was probably only long after the full-year course had been completed, when I read Aesthetics & Politics cover-to-cover that I became relatively comfortable with the concepts discussed in the course.

Literature & Theory

I’d taken a course on English literature in the 20th century (ENG140). The emphasis of that course, as I recall (which I don’t recall well because I took it in the summer of 2004 while I was working full-time and taking another course on comparative politics) was not so much on the political or social implications of the texts (and we read some very good texts) as the moves within aesthetics, almost devoid of context — from romanticism to naturalism to … I don’t even remember. I do recall the professor’s analysis of the purple triangle in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a recurring motif, the significance of which flew over my head and probably still would (unless it was related to the politics of queer liberation, which, I can assure you, it wasn’t). I’m probably being unfair to the course, we did read In the Skin of a Lion, as well as Waiting for Godot, and I remember something about postmodernism being discussed (so maybe the course was moving through the major trends of literature?). Though, at the time, in the class I was taking on comparative politics, I learned about the concept of post-materialism which made a lot more sense to me. I should go back to my notes and see if I can actually give a fair and balanced account of the course content. Suffice it to say it bored me, very much.

My next experience with literature was a course on graphic novels (The ‘New Comics’, VIC300) with Luca Somigli. I enjoyed the content of the course, I’d already read most of the comics covered before starting the course anyway; and, judging from the mark I got on my final paper, Prof. Somigli enjoyed my paper very much. I wrote about Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde and his use of stereotypes to advance his political and moral agenda. Still, the discussions of literary theory and aesthetic theory, most of which I don’t recall anyway, probably went flying over my head. From these, and other experiences, I’d reckon that the most difficult thing in taking courses that are entirely outside of one’s academic purview is to acquire and maintain the vocabulary. By vocabulary, I don’t mean just the meanings of new words, but the significances and usages thereof. It took me, for instance, two whole years to wrap my head around the idea of postmodernism.

I suspect a lot of this had to do with the fact that I didn’t really think such terms and courses would be of much use to me — I was focusing on getting into medical school, not graduate school — and no one in life science or the kind of political science I was taking at UofT really cared about such things. That makes me wonder, as an aside, do Straussians bother to acknowledge postmodernism or think it worthy of being addressed? I don’t know of anyone like Harvey Mansfield — whose translations of The Prince and Discourses on Livy are superb — having written on Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Unmanly Liberal Academics.

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In Brecht’s Threepenny Novel, the character of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum observes:

Politicians can only take money because people picture their corruption as being altogether finer and nobler than it really is. Should anyone portray them as they are, that is, quite unscrupulous, then the whole world would cry out: What an unscrupulous rascal! and, by that, mean the portrayer.

It made me laugh.

And from one of Brecht’s unpublished drafts, writing in the 1950s about the 1990s to come:

The authorities had been able to cancel travel entirely since television now showed everything that interested delegations…. By means of raising productivity and volunteerism as well as by increasing efficiency, it was possible to limit the number of workers needed. At last, about 99% of the population could devote itself to the real goal of life, to the filling out of forms.

I have a bit of a propensity to avoid writing. It’s not that I dislike writing, I don’t; it’s more like I can’t be bothered to write out something once I’ve figured it out in my head. This explains how I approach essays and papers — once it’s in my head, that is to say, once I’ve assembled and arranged my research and my arguments, writing the actual essay is akin to moving a mountain. It also explains why I don’t blog much. If I really need to get something out, I might spill it out to an unsuspecting (and nonplussed) acquaintance — who perhaps writes off my momentary lapse of restraint to my eccentricity (or, weirdness), and as this occurrence replicates itself he may simply consider it to be the cost of engaging in otherwise mundane conversations with me (few, and happily, far between). When I can’t do that, I may end up typing whatever it is out, in a blog post. Other times — and this is perhaps most of the times I do write — I’m motivated by anger, frustration, or a pensive (or nostalgic) mood. Sometimes I may rant to a person and then refine that into a blog post.

I also don’t seem to find the time to indulge in fiction — that is to say, reading novels or watching many films (I do follow certain television shows regularly, though). The last novel I read was To Kill a Mockingbird out of some sense of obligation to my general schooling — though it was never on the curriculum. Until yesterday, the last film I can remember having actually sat down to watch was Spider-Man 3 — in the cinema — that is, not including documentaries. I’m no film critic or theorist — and to the extent that I’m interested in film criticism and theory, it’s for general aesthetic principles and not because of my love of the medium — there is no list of films sitting on my desktop waiting to be consummated. I read and watch far more non-fiction than I do fiction. Indeed, when recently asked if I read fiction, I responded, “Yes, I read the news.” This dearth of fiction doesn’t include comics, of course. I have almost an obsession with the medium, which means I read just about everything I can get my hands on, when I get the time to do so.

In the past few days I’ve been reading plays written by Bertolt Brecht (his plays are much easier to find than his poetry or his works on aesthetic theory) and have started on his novelization of his play, Threepenny Opera — the novel, aptly enough, is titled Threepenny Novel. Additionally, in the past two days I downloaded and watched several films, some of which I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time: Hitch, Hero, Thank You For Smoking, Art School Confidential, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Pursuit of Happyness.

Although all of these films, in their own ways, have something to say about love, life, politics and happiness, the last in particular — The Pursuit of Happyness — raised my ire most.

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Gulzar’s words:

Jungle jungle baat chali hai, pata chala hai
Arre, chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai, phool khila hai

Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai
Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai

Ek parinde hua sharminda, tha woh nanga!
Bhai, isse to ande ke andar, tha who changa!
Soonch raha hai bahar aakhir kyon nikla hai
Arre, chaddi pahan ke phool khila hai, phool khila hai

Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai
Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai

And mine:

Everywhere in the jungle word is spreading, it’s become known
Well, a shorts-wearing flower has blossomed, a flower’s blossomed

Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed
Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed

A bird became embarrassed — he was naked
Instead of this, inside his egg, he was just fine
Wondering why he he came out at all
Well, a shorts-wearing flower has blossomed

Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed
Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed

Needless to say the shortcomings are in my translation and not in the wonderful song that Gulzar wrote for this TV series. I first came across it in India in the early 90s, I don’t remember precisely when — I was far too young to be able to keep track. But there in front of a black and white television, my cousins gathered and eagerly watched this show. The theme song has seeped into the popular discourse of Hindi-speaking Indians, particularly the refrain, “Jungle jungle pata chala hai, chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai”, and the character of Mowgli. I don’t recall following the series, indeed, I couldn’t — there was no Doordarshan TV in Saudi Arabia, and when satellite channels came out, I don’t recall any of them carrying this show. But in any case, the refrain’s been in my head as well.

I read The Jungle Book in grade six. I enjoyed it, and it attests to Rudyard Kipling’s creativity (and perhaps his accessibility). I hadn’t really been exposed to Orientalism as a theoretical concept so I wasn’t quite thinking of that when I read the book. (Though my grade six teacher, Ms Pate, did try to introduce us to socially relevant literature — rights of African-Americans and the problems of clear-cutting and indigenous rights — and a lot of that probably made an impact on me.) Disney also produced an animated film based on the book. But The Jungle Book TV series was produced in Japan, primarily for a Japanese audience but, it seems, with an eye for export — and it was exported all around the world from what I can see on YouTube. There are dubbings in Finnish, German, English, Tagalog and, of course, Hindi. Thus, there’s a trajectory from British-occupied India to Kipling’s imagination to the Disney remake to the Japanese remake before coming back to India….