Heil Obama, the War President

The Obama administration is turning up the pressure on Pakistan to fight the Taliban inside its borders, warning that if it does not act more aggressively, the US will use considerably more force on the Pakistani side of the border to shut down Taliban attacks on US forces in Afghanistan.

Superb. The US sends its troops inside Afghanistan to help the regime to fight the Taliban.

There is fighting and US forces are killed too.

Pakistan is fighting its own Taliban.

The US is now saying it will use force to shut down those attacks on its soldiers in Afghanistan.

What are we missing here?

It is a truly duh moment.

If his troops are there to fight the Taliban, then why can they not take on the ones that come from the border?

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As you already know Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize. He is set to receive it later this week. Guess what?

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “He is accepting the Nobel Peace Prize as a war President.” After the decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan he will also mention it in his speech.

I have no clue what a war president is. One waging war or one waging war against war or one who has been caught in a war or one who has inherited it? Does this not reduce the very idea of the peace prize? True, precedents are there of people at war receiving the prize, but to go there and say, look, I am sending troops, however, it is all good and yet I take responsibility, so I accept this award as the war president on behalf of the American people – is this okay?

Should he be speaking on behalf of the American people at all? I know this is a hypothetical scenario. He may accept it on his own. And the American people will be left with the baby and the bathwater and those plastic duckies.

Venky’s Chicken

He is obviously doing more than going through his emails. In today’s Times of India he has reacted to the reactions to his reaction about the woes of his inbox. He has apologised for “inadvertently” hurting people.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was quite candid as I mentioned in the earlier post. He talked about people bothering him. So, what is this?

I want to make it clear that I was delighted to hear from scientific colleagues and students whom I had met personally in India and elsewhere, as well as close friends with whom I had lost touch. Unlike real celebrities like movie stars, we scientists generally lead a quiet life, and are not psychologically equipped to handle publicity. So I found the barrage of emails from people whom I didn’t know or whom I only knew slightly almost 40 years ago (nearly all from India) difficult to deal with.

And he was psychologically savvy enough to hit out? Did he know the Nobel Committee? And did he not say he congratulated the person who called to inform him about the prize for his Swedish accent, assuming it was a crank call? So, if he can answer phone calls from strangers, he is going to get emails from strangers.

People have also taken offence at my comment about nationality being an accident of birth. However, they don’t seem to notice the first part of the sentence: We are all human beings.

I noticed the whole comment and reproduced it. Being human beings is an obvious fact and even those who go into space don’t cease being human beings. I wish he had the courage of his convictions and stood up for what he had said instead of this rubbish:

Accident or not, I remain grateful to all the dedicated teachers I had. Others have said I have disowned my roots. Since 2002, I have come almost every year to India. In these visits, I have spent time on institute campuses giving lectures or talking to colleagues and students, and stayed in the campus guest house. I have not spent my time staying in fancy hotels and going sightseeing.

Roots are not about giving lectures and staying at campuses. By going sightseeing you do not become less of an Indian. He is coming here on work in his professional capacity and has the audacity to talk about it as maintaining connections with his roots. He could have been going on lecture tours to Jalalabad, for all we care.

Finally, at a personal level, although I am westernized, many aspects of culture like a love for classical Indian music or South Indian or Gujarati food are simply a part of me.

So? I know westerners who love our cuisine and music and culture. What is he trying to prove? He has even given an interview about riding bicycles and all those wonderful memories. Why did he not think about them before shooting off his mouth about some professor making tall claims? Did these memories not seem important then?

Some of us had taken what he said in the right spirit, respecting his privacy and right to be not an Indian. He has, unfortunately, decided to do a 360 degree turn and come across as extremely patronising:

I am personally not that important. If I hadn’t existed, this work would still have been done. It is the work that is important, and that should be what excites people. Finally, there are many excellent scientists in India and elsewhere who will never win a Nobel. But their work is no less interesting and people should find out about what they do. My visits to India confirm that it has great potential and bright young students. A little less nationalistic hero worship will go a long way to fulfil that potential.

We know there is potential. While there are a few of us who do not believe in blind nationalistic worship, there are others who do so. That is why we have Gandhi and Nehru cults. How will less hero worship tap potential? He says he was excited about Gellman’s work and it did not matter what his nationality was. True. So, Indians also worship Michael Jackson and Angelina Jolie. What potential will they be fulfilling? And will anyone take him on about the “less nationalistic” advice? No. Because we are idiots. We will throw stones at our own when they point out certain hard facts, but not at this man.

Is it only about his inbox? If all this was unimportant, he would not be writing this defensive little piece. He would have gone on with his work instead of telling us about how we must look for potential and learn from his work, his roots notwithstanding. Fine. As I said, people will move on. He should too. And I hope he has the good sense now to let go and get into his quiet life and further tap his potential. The Nobel is not the end of the world, as he has so self-deprecatingly implied. Now all he has to do is stop holding forth on India, although the adulation will certainly be hugely appealing.

We are happy for him in his heavenly abode – the West.

Hey, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, you've NOT got mail

I am so glad our Nobel laureate has said what he has.

“All sorts of people from India have been writing to me, clogging up my email box. It takes me an hour or two to just remove their mails. Do these people have no consideration? It is OK to take pride in the event, but why bother me? There are also people who have never bothered to be in touch with me for decades who suddenly feel the urge to connect. I find this strange.”

There are two levels on which I adore this comment.

1. He is not upto silly public relations and seeking of roots. I guess in his field it won’t matter much; an atom and molecule here or there won’t really pull at heart strings, unlike, say, a Salman Rushdie who can really get us all worked up because he is working on us. So, good going.

2. This business of thinking every Indian is really Indian makes no sense. I know the expats get irritated when I say it but here is one of you saying it in so many words, words that are far from polite, whether it would be in the gentle temple town of Chidambaram or the robust Punjab.

You won’t find him returning to be garlanded and have tilak put on his forehead and talk about how rich our culture is and how much he would like to dig into the rasam rice. He does not give a damn, and I am glad. We have enough of these Johnnies in New Jersey trying to claim heritage and crap. This man knows that some teacher at Annamalai University is faking it when he says that Venkatraman was his student. He must qualify as a true child prodigy for he left India when he was only three. He has called it “all sorts of lies”.

Ramakrishnan said it was good if his winning the Nobel Prize encouraged people to take interest in science.

“But I, personally, am not important. The fact that I am of Indian origin is even less important. We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth.”

Great. I almost said ‘saar’ and then realised he would not know what that meant. I’d have to say jolly good, now that he is not even in the US.

However, I would like to know if he will indulge in such plain talking when the heads of countries congratulate him. If being Indian is of no value, and it ought not to be given that he was so little when he left, then he should be able to tell them to just chill. I mean, no one sends congratulatory notes to an accident of birth. He could have been born in Jhumri Tallaiyya and no one would have cared. Now Tamil Nadu and Surat and all of India think their dharti putra (son of the soil) has won. Some may even be planning to invite him. Fuhgetit. He is not playing ball. He might like to tell his father not to go around giving interviews about the Indianness, though.

As for the belief that people will take more interest in science because of his victory, this is temporary. It happens when someone goes to space or cracks a code. No one is mastering spelling after a girl of Indian origin won the Spelling Bee contest.

Given the number of Indian restaurants doing brisk business in the West, we have not had a surfeit of people getting interested in food. We just like to celebrate anything.

So, here is a short note to him:

Sorry about all those emails telling you nice-nice things about things no one knows or understands. Or, someone asking you about how is life and all that, as though you are interested in such small things. You are now big man and I am not flooding your inbox because I am fully understanding how inbox is suffering because of overweight. We Indians are like that only, eating and eating and getting fat. Not working out. But obesity is American problem also. You not knowing because you are busy with test tubes.

But, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, one day when the Western press asks you about anything on India, and they just might – about its foreign policy, its poverty, its global leap - please do not give your opinion. Even though you may be well-read, speak as a foreigner, not as one who knows. Coz, although you might remember the ground as you learned to crawl here, you don’t know the ground realities.

India does not count to you, and we respect that. For some of us, the chemistry prize could have gone to some Maori tribal. We don’t give a tosh. Oh, that reminds me to start deleting all those emails that are choking my inbox. You have to pay the price for fame; I have to pay the price for just being an Indian trying hard to be seen as one.

Rib-o-some, eh?

The golden mean and the go-betweens

Maverick: The golden mean and the go-betweens

By Farzana Versey

Covert, Feb 1-15

It’s time for ideological palm-greasing. The very same industrialists who were weeping over terrorism a couple of months ago are now propping up Narendra Modi as the leader at the helm.

But, are we sitting in judgment only because we are talking about prominent people, when we are well aware that bribery is a part and parcel of everyday life – even our own?

Why must we get so uptight and upright over such backing, when we are a country of middlemen? Have we, even in our daily lives, got things done without the services of a well-wisher, a balancing force?

If today you know of some obscure people, it is because they have paid to become known. As P.T.Barnum, the public relations biggie, said, “The bigger the humbug, the better the people will love it.” So, the wannabes get to hobnob with the cream of society, many of who are of doubtful merit, and the impression given is that, look, we believe in equal opportunities, we don’t care about who is who. Few are honest as an advertiser was in one of our respected financial papers, when he stated clearly: “Wanted person experienced in the art of ‘lubricating’ top executives in banks.”

Isn’t this a regular occurrence? Can any of us get any work done without paying for it in cash or kind? Does the middleman not make life somewhat easy, just like the blackmarketeer at a cinema hall, the helpful peon at a government office whose only demand is chai-paani and the high-ranking official, who miraculously provides water in drought-prone areas because the private sector, which he publicly claims to hate, provides him with a brown paper packet?

Why get into this serious area of moral accountability? Births, marriages and deaths, all need someone to make the passage clear.

Social workers are go-betweens of another kind. They act as buffers between good and evil. They also get catapulted into the forefront of a movement or sit in air-conditioned offices of corporate honchos, sipping herbal tea and demanding donations.

Demanding has become a normal practice. If you are a beleaguered soul seeking justice or merely have a case in the courts, the black-robed ravens swoop down on you. The ‘names’ charge a neat 50,000 rupees for a one-page consultation. Some straightaway ask for a cut if it is a property matter.

Real estate agents are another bugbear. Forget what they promise you. Just watch the gleam in their eye as you sign on the dotted line and they get their two per cent commission.

The doctor sends you to a specialist; the specialist parcels you off to a bigger guy; the cut at the end could be in lakhs. While the general physicians have to make do with weekly luncheons that pass off as conferences, the ones with fancier degrees get all-expenses-paid trips abroad sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. How does it affect you? Your friendly doctor will insist you use those medicines which might be infinitely more expensive.

The media cannot be absolved. It is the most in-demand profession. Hacks who have managed to re-word a press release a few times on a certain topic are called experts and invited on junkets to hold forth on the subject. Academicians enjoy similar elevation, based purely on the number of footnotes in the paper they present.

God has not been spared. When you go shopping for a guru or a saint, you are looking not so much for solace as for a nice middleman. Everyone knows that the Real Thing is somewhat confusing, an abstraction, and understanding this entity can get time-consuming, besides taking a toll on your brains. So you deposit your searching soul at the feet of a holy one and leave it to him/her to pass on your messages, requests, and complaints to God. Along the way you drop some money into a donation box or sprinkle ghee into fire or slaughter an animal, depending on what you are told to do. This is not to appease any Higher Power, but to make your earthly messenger feel that something is being done.

When two sides have a dispute, it is the ‘agents’ who get away, pleading quite truthfully that they are merely caught in the middle.

Waiting for approval

Why, why, why are we so stupid and desperate? Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was in Mumbai. She was mentioning Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as her “professors”. Someone in the audience asked her if there had been any Indian literary influence.

What was she supposed to say? She mentioned that she had read a number of them and they had “opened my mind”.

There is something quite disgusting about how we want a foreign nod for everything. When an Indian writer goes to America, they won’t ask about American influence or in the UK about British influence. Here, we are not even talking about a novice.

Do we ask doctors if they are influenced by illnesses in India? Do we ask sportspersons if they are influenced by our sports stars? Or Hollywood stars by Bollywood?

I shall wait for the day we have a conference for janitors and one of them is asked about being influenced by Indian shit.

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We are like that only. We wait and wait and wonder and wonder when President-elect Barack Obama will call up Manmohan Singh. Foreign secretaries and people who know about these things, like telephone instruments, hold forth and say things like “It is too early to make an assessment”. Why don’t we just call up and talk to the “mutt” or send him a dog and get it over with?

The French kiss and the American miss

You wouldn’t know Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio even if a whole bottle of Eau de whatever was emptied in your nose and glasses of Chardonnay singed your stomach.

Oui, oui, je joins le troupeau. Le monsieur has won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.

The citation lauds him as the “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

Huh? Are not all departures new, unless you wish to reclaim the old in a contemporary setting? Isn’t all ecstasy sensual in that it appeals to the senses? I can understand humanity beyond, but what does humanity “below the reigning civilization” mean?

The good thing about such awards is that the author’s works get translated and become accessible. I do like what has been said about Désert, “the story of a young nomad woman from the Sahara and her clashes with modern European civilization”.

One of his works has been compared with Albert Camus. The French, and we might include Sartre, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, and Beckett (who also wrote in the language), have had a history of standing at the edge of existentialism. The writers were essentially exploring the idea of rebellion. France had been the hub of literary angst that invited outsiders, whereas the insiders were seeking to metaphorically escape.

Therefore, there is a bit of irony that the ruling class has often tried to co-opt them.

The NYT report states:

In a reminder that politics and culture are closely intertwined in France, the prime minister, François Fillon, said in a statement that the award “consecrates French literature” and “refutes with éclat the theory of a so-called decline of French culture.”

Consecrating anything spells its death, or rather celebrates it. And is culture relegated to literature? Literature is the product of culture; it isn’t the creator. As I have said before, it is a recorder. Culture could be cuisine. It could be a way of living.

Mr. Le Clézio once described himself in an interview as “a poor Rousseauist who hasn’t really figured it out.”

Just for that he stands tall. The moment you have figured it out and the questions stop, you will never find answers. And the Nobel Prize winner thinks so too when he says, “The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.”

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A week before the announcement, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl rubbished the Americans:

“Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world... not the United States.”

Europe has always been seen a culture snob, and its literature is no exception. Yet, I do not see the prudence of hemming in all of European literature under one roof. What would a German have in common with the English, or the French with the Spanish? Is ancient Greek literature to be held in reverence forever?

My knowledge of contemporary American literature is limited, but would the accusation that US writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” and therefore dragging down the quality of their work hold true?

Is sensitivity and intimacy with one’s environment not important enough to be able to critique the same mass culture? If the allegation serves to convey that American writers tend to fall prey to mass trends, then that is indeed the case with a limited number of people anywhere in the world.

Pop culture is a legitimate area of study, whether in fiction or non-fiction. Wasn’t consumerism the central theme of Death of a Salesman?

“The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

Here I have to admit that I find US political policy and the great masses to be insular; there is an element of not being quite aware of what happens outside the super bowl of American life. However, artistes have tried to break the barrier.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, provided a response:

“And if he (Engdahl) looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola.”

Spirited as the rejoinder was, it did not examine that Coke is in fact a great leveller and hardly cause of the insulation. The cola has crossed the big divide and is chicken soup for many a writer dead-beat on a metaphor for ‘uncivilisation’.

Tonight, I shall shun the fizz as a mark of respect and drink to mine own eyes.