What does Australian media have to say about the revolution that is happening in India?

What does Australian media have to say about the revolution that is happening in India? Nothing. I have been scouring the news for what is termed now the ‘second struggle for freedom’. Our first fight for freedom was against the British Raj and we won it on paper on 15 August, 1947. The second struggle is being fought again our own fellow Indians. Rather, it is being fought against that most endemic of all epidemics – corruption. Anna Hazare and his supporters have been striving to get the parliament to pass the Lokpal bill, which is primarily an anti-corruption bill, one that brings all government official under the anti-corruption radar. No wonder the government was not prepared to pass the bill. The bill will force the elected representatives to be responsible officials. Scams and swindles will be curtailed at best or controlled at worst. No wonder the bill has not been passed in the parliament for the past four decades. But Team Anna has forced the government to go down on its knees. This is a wonderful expression of democracy, as much as the recent revolutions in Tunisia, in Egypt, and in Libya. What sets this revolution apart is that it is not meant to overthrow a self-appointed despot or a despotic government; it is a furthering of what democracy stands for. Democracy is not simply the right to elect governing representatives, but also getting them to function in a responsible fashion. The current revolutions reflect what is said in ‘The Declaration of Independence’, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

I come back to my original question here – what does Australian media have to say about an ideological revolution that has brought all of India together, something that only Cricket and communal violence have been able to do in the recent past? Nothing. I have been looking at the leading newspapers and they talk about the war in Libya, hurricane Irene, about a rapist, a secret river discovered in Amazon, about a holiday couple dying in Morocco, etc. You get the idea. Australia lies so isolated and so secure in itself that it sees no reason to comment on the upheaval of ideas happening in one of its closest allies – India. There is no mention of India in ‘World’ section of these papers. What about the ‘Opinion & Blogs’ section? These are the keywords that jump at me – labour, Gillard, gay marriage, more labour, more Gillard. This is the state of Australian media’s involvement with the world of ideas. India will come in news only if there are more bomb blasts like the ones we witnessed in Mumbai or if Indians are attacked in Australia for whatever reason (race, economic reasons, etc.). Australian journalism needs to wake up to the issues that are driving the world – issues that are not directly related to the economy and stock marker, warfare, race, gay and lesbian rights and sports. The world of human ideas is comprised of much more than that but Australian media seems to be yet unaware of that fact.

Aisi’s ominous booklist for winter

1. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstien. (1818).

2. Stevenson, Robert L. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (1886).

3. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. (1926).

4. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. (1990). – short stories

5. Baldwin, James. Another Country. (1962).

6. Wright, Richard. Native Son. (1940).

7. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. (2007).

8. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. (1985).

9. Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime. (1975).

10. Salinger, J.D. Catcher in the Rye. (1951).

11. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. (1991) – play

12. Hansberry, Lorraine. Raisin in the Sun. (1959). – play

13. Wolfe, George C. The Colored Museum. (1986). – play

14. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly (1988). – play

15. Pratchett, Terry. Night Watch. (1997).

16. Pratchett, Terry. Unseen Academicals. (2009).

17. Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying. (1993).

18. Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men. (1983).

SF/F

1. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).

2. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. (1969).

3. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. (1984).

4. Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. (2000).

5. Miéville, China. Scar. (2002).

6. Miéville, China. Iron Council. (2004).

7. LeGuin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. (1971).

8. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. (1985).

9. Butler, Octavia. The Parable of the Sower. (1993).

10. Butler, Octavia. The Parable of the Talents. (1998).

11. Capek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). (1921).

12. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. (1932).

13. Morgan, Richard K. Altered Carbon. 2003).

14. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-four. (1949).

15. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. (1945).

16. Robson, Justina. Natural History. (2004).

17. Zamyatin, Yvegney. We. (1921).

18. Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. (2010).

I start with ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ by R.L.Stevenson because that is easiest to get online. I remember reading the book more than a decade ago along with other R.L.Stevenson books – ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped’. I really do not remember the stories anymore. I just finished reading two classic Agatha Christie books – ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ and ‘Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.’ I miss reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators and The Famous Five. Sometimes I tire of the heavy literature books. I miss reading the Perry Mason books. Doing research in science does not help matters because there is not much time to read detective stories of this kind. Of course, science itself is a detective story.

My favourite first lines

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” – Pride and Prejudice/Jane Austen

“From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastned for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air created heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became slanted with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.” – Absalom, Absalom!/William Faulkner

“All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Anna Karenina (Translated by Louise & Aylmer Maude)/Leo Tolstoy

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” – The Road/Cormac McCarthy

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” – One Hundred Years of Solitude (Translated by Gregory Rabassa)/Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” – Love in the Time of Cholera (Translated by Edith Grossman)/Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.” – The Corrections/Jonathan Franzen

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since.” – The Great Gatsby/Scott F. Fitzgerald

And oh, I love this one:

“Then there was bad weather.” – From ‘A Moveable Feast’/ Ernest Hemingway

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I have finally got two Harry Potter movies that I love – Parts I and II of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. I guess that is because the book was split in two parts so the story is not compromised like it was done the last movies. I always say that it is unfair to look compare a book and the movie that it is adapted into because the written and the visual medium are both quite different. Also, I personally feel that the movie always lets the book down because it usually does not match up to the imagined version of the story in the reader’s mind.

Having said that, I loved the movie version of ‘The Lord of the Rings’. I hated all the Harry Potter movies until now. I have just seen both part of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. The movies are brilliant. David Yates has directed these two movies, just as he directed ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’. I did not really like them, but David Yates has done a great service to the book by being quite faithful to it owing to making two parts of it.

David Yates employs special effects in a way that Mani Ratnam forgot in ‘Raavan’. Visual effects and cinematography are useless as long as the story is weak. Every element of a movie has to subserve the story. The older Harry Potter movies had the same flaw. The present two movies have completely overcome that problem, which is why I think they are brilliant.

Death and Taachi

Tvisha and I were watching ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ Part I. We got to the part where Dobby the house-elf dies in the arms of Harry. Tvisha says, “Dobby go to taachi”, ‘taachi’ in her language being sleep. It is not very surprising that she should say so, because when Dobby’s eyes are closed, he does look as if he were sleeping. What came next stumped me. She says, “Dobby gone.” When I asked her what she meant and said that Dobby was both ‘taachi’ and gone. It appears to me that she has formed the concept of death and mortality. She seems to have realized that though death looks like sleep, people do not come back from it. Tvisha is just over three years old. She said the same thing when she saw Lord Voldemort desecrating the tomb of Albus Dumbledore to get the Elder Wand, “Professor taachi. Professor gone.”

How did she relate the two? It must have something to do with the development of the idea of time, space and causality. Infants have no concept of temporality. When we hide behind a curtain, infants believe that we are gone. The same is true for toddlers too. They also do not have a clear demarcation between ‘self’ and ‘other’. That is why they ‘hide’ in full view of us under a table and play peek-a-boo. They believe that because they cannot see us, we cannot see them either. Through the course of figuring out all that, they will have reached a point where they can recognize permanency and finality. Tvisha must have inferred some kind of finality in that sleep-like state Dobby was in. It must be an interesting experiment to see by what stage children recognize death, but we may not get an ethics clearance for it. Death is not an easy topic to broach for adults, it may not be easy with children either. Parents may not like us talking about death to very young children. But I will observe Tvisha as she comments on what she sees in movies.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

I finished reading ‘The Memory Keeper’s Daughter’ by Kim Edwards. It is a well-written book, though not very moving. For the story to work, it had to move me. A father abandoning his new-born daughter because she had Down’s Syndrome and the struggles of a nurse in raising that abandoned child should have made me cry, but they did not. The plot was quite predictable though that is usually not a problem in fiction – all plots are predictable by and large. But the characters were not strong enough to hold together such a predictable plot. The absence of any form of resolution also bothers me. The characters were all left in a state of limbo by the end of the book.

The title of the book does not resonate well with the story. Somewhere in the middle of the book, the meaning of a memory keeper is mentioned – it is found as a caption for the camera bought for David – he becomes a passionate photographer and his work gets featured in museums and delivers talks about his work; the camera is the memory keeper, not David. There is a constant stream of photographs being sent and taken and stored and hidden. But they are not all taken by David. Caroline Gill takes and send photos of Phoebe, the girl abandoned by David.

Of course, there is another object that acts as a memory keeper – a house, which is a recurring motif in the book. The house in which David was born and raised, which was the house in which his sister June died of a developmental heart problem. The first house in which David and Norah lived, the house to which they brought back Paul from the hospital with Norah being told that her twin daughter died at childbirth. The house in which they all lived finally and the one from which Dr, David Henry ran out. He goes to his childhood home and finds Rosemary. Al likes to come home to Caroline and Phoebe. Paul always seeks to stay away from home – his house as well as America – the homeland and the heartland (which happens to be part of the title of a collection of paintings done by Julia Alvarez and Gao Xingjian – Between the Homeland and the Heartland). Paul is always torn between of the two of them. As is everyone else in the book, except maybe Phoebe. Norah’s work in the travel agency is her bid to escape the homeland and the heartland.

The basic idea is that the past is never past, and the answers to the present are almost always present in the narratives of the past. The problem with this book for me was that this plunge into the past was not dramatized enough. After an encounter with the past, if it has been honest, there is usually a self-destructive epiphany where the truth kills you or there is a Phoenix-like experience where you are metaphorically destroyed but not without the possibility of renewal and the emergence of a new creation (I think that is what happens in ‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen, where there is also the motif of a house and there is an encounter of sorts with the past, but there is a kind of transformation associated with it that does not trivialize that encounter). In this book, I think that the face-to-face with the past has been played down, where I believe it should have been played up.