Dream Ink

‘Startup Capitals’ now available for pre-order!

2014-12-09T10:58:00.000+08:00

Startup Capitals : Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (English)

Product Details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Random House India (31 December 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 8184005946
ISBN-13: 978-8184005943
Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 14 cm

As the Internet has matured in technology and reach, we have seen an explosion in tech startups all over the world. Not only are some of these startups changing the world and how we live in it, they are also proving to be the engines of job creation – an aspect that will be critical in the future. To support these startups, new ecosystems are popping up all over the globe to help grow these companies, aided by governments, successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

In Startup Capitals, Zafar Anjum brings you a ringside view from the worlds top ten startup cities of the world. Well-researched and highly insightful, this book lays bare the engines of innovation and the lessons that can be learnt from these burgeoning startup capitals.

Advance praise

"As we enter a new phase in human history – a phrase Ive referred to as Civilization 3.0-creativity and entrepreneurial spirit are achieving new milestones for humanity. How and where this creativity is flourishing today is the subject of Anjums book. It is a timely account of some of the most innovative entrepreneurial places on earth and should prove to be a very compelling read." – Vivek Ranadive, Founder and CEO, TIBCO Software, Inc. Owner, Sacramento Kings
"Startup Capitals takes us on an enthralling and stimulating tour of some of the most innovative cities on the globe. It is a timely and illuminating account of people and places that are shaping the human future." – Virender Aggarwal, CEO, Ramco Systems
"Creativity and invention do not occur in isolation. Environment and community fuel it. Mr. Anjum gives us a journey through those landscapes where the future is being created and inspires us to join those cities of innovation that define our time." – Matthew Putman PhD, CEO, Nanotronics Imaging, New York
"Silicon Valley is more than the sum of its parts. And as the world looks at the ‘sum’, this new book zooms in on the parts-the history, events, people and unique occurrences that add up to make the Valley what it is. As a tech strategist and business partner with more than 30 years of experience with Silicon Valley, I value the insight and specific recommendations Zafar Anjum has gathered in this important book." – Barbara Bates, Founder and CEO, Eastwick, Silicon Valley
"Many of the world want to emulate Silicon Valley, yet few have brought context to the incredible story thats taken shape here. Looking deeply at the Valleys history and how our unique ecosystem took shape, Zafar Anjum offers new perspectives that global innovators can use as they envision the communities-and the companies-that build economic success." – Ellen Petry Leanse, Tech Pioneer and Advisor, San Francisco
"Zafar does a brilliant job identifying the key factors that make a city a startup city. – Daniel T. Cohen, Cybersecurity Professional and Strategist at RSA, The Security Division of EMC, Israel
Where will be the next centre of innovation? What are the ingredients for a successful startup ecosystem? These are significant questions for which the jury is still out. Through this book, Zafar Anjum offers insights into the intriguing and exciting world of startups that are shaping our future." – Manish Goel, co-founder and CEO, TrustSphere, New York
"Over the years, Zafar has created a highly respected body of work in journalism. He tackles his subject matter with the tenacity and thoroughness of a good investigative reporter. His previous books have not only been great pieces of journalistic work but also, most importantly, good reads. Startup Capitals promises to be an informative and engrossing piece of work which will add to the understanding of why some cities are more successful than others in nurturing innovation and a risk-taking culture." – Amit Roy Choudhury, Technology Editor, The Business Times (Singapore)

About the Author

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and filmmaker. He currently works as the Asia Online Editor of Computerworld Singapore, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. His most recent works include Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (2014), The Resurgence of Satyam (2012) and The Singapore Decalogue – Episodes in the Life of a Foreign Talent (2012). He edits a literary website, Kitaab.org.

Pre-order the book at Amazon and Flipkart now.

Narendra Modi and the Death of the Idea of India

2014-04-25T11:14:00.002+08:00

For a long time now I have contained my rage which has been provoked by what is happening in

India

today, and it concerns the future of

India

as a nation and as a country.

Indians are offering a man the coveted and powerful chair of the country’s Prime Minister under whose watch a state-sponsored pogrom resulted in the murder of several thousand innocent citizens. At the same time, they are branding an honest citizen activist a ‘fugitive’ who abandoned a state’s chief ministerial post simply because the establishment did not allow him to pass a tough anti-corruption law.

The one accused of ‘mass murder’ is a hero, worthy of being crowned a king. The man of principles, an anti-corruption crusader, is a laughing stock. The sitting Oxbridge-educated Prime Minister is a dummy head, a man stoically blind to the corrupt in his own ranks, clinging to his post at the cost of his dwindling reputation.

Is this the state of the nation that nationalist Indian leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Abul Kalam Azad had envisaged when they laid down the foundations of a free

India

in 1947?

Today, the country is divided on the lines of caste and religion and on top of that, no opportunity is lost in abusing the sane and the secular, online or offline. How did

India

arrive at this shameful juncture of history? (See this open letter by Indian intellectuals in The Guardian: If Modi is elected, it will bode ill for India's future.)

At stake—The idea of

India

While the nation is presently going through its most decisive elections in its 70 year old democratic history, what is at stake is the very idea of

India

: the idea that fueled the struggle for

India

’s Independence, culminating in the establishment of a free, democratic, socialist and secular Republic of India.

This idea of

India

was based on the principles of equality and inclusiveness, on the ideals of secularism and equal respect to all religions and creeds. It was, what Mohammad Iqbal once called, a poetic idea, sophisticated beyond its time and place.

As Indian historian Ramchandra Guha has noted in his book, The Makers of Modern India, Indian democracy is unique in the sense that

India

became a nation and a democracy at the same time, and five different types of revolutions are going on in

India

simultaneously. What’s been happening in

India

since Independence is what took Europe a couple of centuries and the

United States

nearly 200 years to achieve. There, it happened in stages. Here, it is happening all at once, and hence, the seeming chaos of

India

, which often makes us despondent and hopeless about

India

’s future.

The poetic idea of India had emerged a winner after defeating a couple of other competing ideas—ideas of a communist state (class-based politics), of a federation of states based on religion (Iqbal and Jinnah’s religious and cultural identity-based politics), and of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ propagated by right wing Hindu groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindu Mahasabha.

If Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wins the parliamentary elections this year, it is the last idea, the idea of

India

being a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ envisioned by far right Hindu nationalists that will come to prevail. This once-defeated idea of

India

will be revived with a Naipaulian revenge.

The Rise of Narendra Modi

In this battle to rule

India

, according to the opinion polls and ground reports, Narendra Modi, BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate, seems to have an edge over all other contenders. Why is he is so popular, both inside and outside

India

among the Hindus?

A lot has been written about this charismatic Hindu rightwing leader from Gujarat—about his humble rise from his tea-selling days to his political stranglehold over Gujarat as a Chief Minister, his powers of oratory, his no-nonsense decision-making, his sex appeal, and so on. The list is countless if you hear to Modi’s acolytes and fan boys.

How did a mediocre man like Modi become the darling of the Indian masses (or that is what we are being led to believe at this point of time)? Is it because contemporary Indians love mediocrity?

Interestingly, Modi is not foreign-educated or highly educated like most of

India

’s Prime Ministers have been. He is a son of the same soil which gave birth to Mahatma Gandhi, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of

Pakistan

. It is quite possible that millions of Indians love him because of his image of a self-made man who can bring change and economic development and ride roughshod over minority rights (which hardly matters in their consciousness). The last point is important because whenever anything is done to favour the Muslims or to ameliorate their condition, BJP brands it as Muslim appeasement, and not secularism. Modi’s hardliner, ‘popular’ image has been created with the help of the media, by spending millions of rupees (Rs. 5,000 crores, according to Aam Aadmi Party) on advertisements and public relations.

BJP’s secularism

I was raised as a secular kid in

India

, and for a long time, I could not understand how a political party like BJP was allowed to exist in

India

. BJP is the political offshoot of the RSS, the Hindu right wing outfit whose ideologies had inspired Nathuram Godse to kill Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Godse was a member of the RSS.

In that sense, BJP’s inherent ideology should be seen as against the Constitution of India. How could the Election Commission of India look the other way and not ban the party? I could not understand this and later on I put it to the strong traditions of

India

’s political pluralism.

Meanwhile, very methodically, whatever remained of the Muslim leadership was wiped out of

India

. Muslim leaders were discouraged (and even discredited) by all political parties. Muslims were left to be led by Non-Muslim leaders who had to strike a balance between their Hindu supporters and their Muslim voters. This led to the persistent and pernicious growth of the vote bank politics. Both the Indian National Congress (INC) and the BJP stand accused of perpetuating this malpractice. Something similar has happened on the lines of caste too, but a generation of successful caste-based leaders has emerged. This has largely benefitted the low-caste Hindus.

As far as the meaningful participation of minorities in Indian politics is concerned, the answer does not lie in stoking the fires of communal politics but of deepening secularism in the political space.

How is this possible?

India

’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was an atheist. In the Nehruvian model of secularism, scientific temper was meant to play a great role, which was further predicated on the spread of mass literacy and education. When the state’s effort to educate the Indian masses failed to a large extent, right wing forces established their Saraswati Shishu Mandirs throughout

India

(As on 2010, about 17,000 such schools existed across

India

). Many liberal private schools were also established (I was fortunate enough to study in one such private school in India, where we were taught co-existence, and respect for other faiths. Our school uniform was saffron, symbolising sacrifice).

At the same time, as the state’s television stations that preached religious tolerance and social unity became irrelevant, heavily Hinduised television programmes created a generation of Indians whose spiritual ethos find an echo in Modi’s image of a Hindu Samrat. For example, it is not surprising that Smriti Irani, a popular TV actress who played the role of a Hindu housewife in an extremely popular TV serial (Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi) and the role of Sita (in Zee TV’s Ramayan) is now a senior leader of the right-wing BJP.

BJP has been very active in making Indians believe in their idea of

India

. Slowly but surely they have chipped away at the idea of Indian secularism with a sustained effort. They believe in overt expression of religion on politics and now Modi talks about ‘Indianness’ before anything else. Whenever he is questioned about secularism, he invokes ‘Indianness’. This is nothing but hollow demagoguery.

Even this could be fine but there is a hitch and that is the Indian Constitution. If BJP can take out the word ‘secular’ from the Indian Constitution, it can do whatever it wants. No one will ask any questions on secularism then.

Meanwhile, Narendra Modi’s electoral promise is growth and economic progress. One wonders how this will be possible when the incumbent Indian Prime Minister, an economist by training and a former World Bank official, has overseen the faltering of the once-strong Indian economy (See this Forbes story: Even Narendra Modi May Not Be Able To Help The Indian Economy). Moreover, BJP’s economic policies are no different from Congress’ (See this Forbes story: BJP Will Ban FDI In Retail But Offers Other Goodies To Business). They are the votaries of the same neoliberal policies that have led to

India

’s development, and inter alia the problems of inflation, price rise, and crony capitalism. Revealingly, if only economic development is the BJP’s election mantra, why has the party put rebuilding of the Ram Temple at the controversial site in Ayodhya on its manifesto? Won’t it alienate the Muslims of India?

But how do you explain all this to the 800 million Indians who might see this complex situation in very simple terms: Congress and its allies have ruled for ten years. It is time to give the other party a chance.

This proves only one thing. That democracy is still in its infancy in

India

. If you don’t believe me, just go to any constituency. In most places, you will see electoral candidates, often from rich and political families, touring the area like a price visiting the hoi polloi. If politics is a business in

India

, what does it make Indian democracy? A marketplace?

My fear is that because of

India

’s size,

India

will remain ungovernable (Indian population being three times the population of

United States

). Confusion of multiparty democracy, communalism and casteism, poverty and illiteracy make the situation even worse. I don’t think even a Lee Kwan Yew could set

India

right. Only time will show us the true path. Until then, we will keep making mistakes.

My fear is that minority politics will survive in

India

as long as minorities maintain their unique identity. Once they start merging their identities with the majority community, politics of caste and religion will melt away. “Poverty makes people create differences,”

India

’s former President APJ Abdul Kalam said in a recent interview. “Sometimes poverty drives these differences. But economic prosperity and higher literacy will make us forget our differences. Economic prosperity is fine but will Muslims accept it at the cost of their religious identity?

As far as those who believe in Gandhi’s and Nehru’s idea of a secular

India

, they should not lose hope. They should do whatever they can to strengthen their idea of

India

, just as the right wing works tirelessly to strengthen their idea of

India

It should not surprise anyone if Modi wins the elections. If a George Bush could win the Presidential elections in the

United States

for two terms, why can’t a Modi win in

India

America

has survived Bush.

India

is a 5,000 year old civilization. She will survive Modi.

Clearly, a Hindu nationalist party’s interests lie in keeping the nation divided. Thankfully, a good sign for

India

’s future is the twin rise of the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party like a DNA’s double helix. One will neutralize the other. That’s where my hope lies. And like Tagore said, in the end,

India

does not belong to Hindus or Muslims.

India

belongs to humanity and when the dust of history settles, and when we are rid of our vanity,

India

will be claimed by humanity.

On reading ‘A Matter of Rats’

2013-09-19T12:32:00.001+08:00

I started reading Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats at 3 am on a Sunday morning. The book was in my office bag, and finding myself suddenly awake, I took it out and went to my study.

Reading the book was like plunging into a rat hole of memories. I had grown up as a child in a village in Bihar and like the ancestral village that Kumar describes in this book, my village too had an adjacent basti. We called it the Mus-har basti (the village of rat-eaters) where low caste Hindu families domiciled. I knew some of the members of those families as they worked on our fields as day labourers. Many of them visited our house everyday to meet my father, a school teacher who doubled up as the village head.

Unlike in Patna, rats then were not a menace in our village. Rats, along with stray cats and dogs, lived and roamed around in our courtyards and galis. They stole grains and sometimes we used to hear that rat-eaters (Mus-hars) had hunted through our fields after the harvesting was done.

As a child I was rather afraid of the big, fat moles that scurried around half-blind through the narrow lanes of our village, dipping in and out of drains as they wished. Them, and the stray dogs that sometimes chased people for no rhyme or reason.

It was in Delhi where I had first encountered the menace of rats. As a newly married couple, I used to live in a run-down flat in South Delhi with my wife and we used to sleep on the floor on a mattress. One day my wife telephoned me in the office. A rat had bitten her on the head while she was asleep. She had awoken with a sharp pain and when she touched her scalp, she found blood on it.

Initially, I could not believe that a rat could bite humans, but after seeing my wife’s case, I had to. Because of the rat bite, my poor wife had to take antibiotics for a while. Reading Kumar’s book, that memory came back to me. A Musahar, a rat-eating man in Kumar’s book, tells him that rats could bite through bricks and concrete. In Patna, Kumar tells us, remnants of food on the face of babies attracted rats who bit them, and nurses played music at night to protect their toes from being bitten by rats—they believed music kept the rats away.

I could never figure out what had attracted a rat to attack my wife. Anyway, the result of that unfortunate episode was a short story titled Rats that I wrote while staying in that flat, which took me to Sri Lanka for a literary conference.

At 3.25 am, when I was almost done with the book’s prologue, a quarrel broke out in the neighborhood, disturbing the peace and stillness of the early morning. A couple was having a verbal fight. I looked out of the window. Across the side road that lay between my flat and the multi-storey car park where the squabble was in progress, there stood a very old tree, almost as tall as the car park, which, with its thick foliage, hid the couple from my view. Through the gaps in the branches, all I could see was a man in a blue shirt and a woman in green, both of the Chinese race which I could figure out from their accented English. The man was shouting and verbally abusing his wife and at one point seemed to push her around too. He was saying things like ‘you have destroyed my life’ and ‘I am done with you’. The woman seemed to be scared and even though she fought back, her voice was cracking up. The man was going to his car which had its blinking lights on.

The bickering went on for almost half an hour when I decided to start taking some notes for this review.

It was 4.13am when I went back to the book. It was an exciting read, more so because I had waited for almost two weeks before the book reached me in Singapore from Bangalore.

In the chapter ‘Patliputra’, Kumar narrates the history of Bihar through his memories of the history of the city and the province from his school days, and how he used to draw diagrams of rulers and emperors from the past during his class hours. He ascribes his desire for drawing the emperors of the past (people who existed before photography was invented) to his incipient sexuality.

Then he proceeds to talk about art and craft in Patna. He describes visiting a museum in Patna where Napoleon’s four-poster bed was on display. Kumar expresses his disappointment with R K Jalan’s collection which he says was more geared towards flattering power. One of the collected items in the museum is a dinner plate belonging to Emperor Akbar’s Prime Minister Birbal. Jalan had persuaded a Viceroy and later on Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, to eat from the same plate.

In the chapter ‘Patna in the Hole’, Kumar looks for traces of Patna in English literature. Surveying literature from E M Forster to Vikram Seth, Kumar laments the fact that Patna hasn’t had much of a presence, and declining if at all, in English literature. However, there has been a nuanced portrayal of Patna in many stories by some great Hindi writers. From there, Kumar proceeds to lambast Shiva Naipaul, the young brother of V S Naipaul, who had visited Patna and had nothing good to say about Bihar. In contrast, he finds Ian Jack, the founding editor of Granta, to be sympathetic towards Biharis. He describes Jack as a writer who could discern some humanity and dignity in the much reviled people of Bihar.

In the chapter where Kumar mentions Ian Jack’s writings on Bihar, there is a mention of my hometown Kishanganj. Ian Jack once visited Bihar to find a lawyer who had defended a labourer from the Himalayan foothills. This man had spent thirty years in prison because of being found travelling without a ticket on the Assam Mail. The whole episode had turned out to be a case of bureaucratic mismanagement. In his second visit, Jack not only finds the lawyer but also the labourer, the guy who lost 30 years of his life. After his jail term, the man lived just outside the jail in Kishanganj. I wondered if I had ever seen that man in my town.

In the next few chapters, Kumar deftly narrates some of the success stories from Patna. “This book is about my hometown Patna; but at its forefront are stories about people,” he writes. On its pages we meet artist Subodh Gupa and his mentor Robin Shaw Pushp; we hear about Bindeshwar Pathak, the man behind the Sulabh International movement, and filmmaker Prakash Jha, the man who has made Patna’s first mall. We also get to hear from Irfan, a former communist now working as a TV journalist in Delhi. I had had the chance to meet some of these people, so it was thrilling to read about them from a different perspective.

One of the fascinating stories in the book is that of youth poet Raghav and his now estranged wife Leela, a struggling TV actress. In a Rashomon-like narrative, the author tries to examine the truth in their crumbling relationship. “It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves,” says the thief to the woodcutter in the classic Akira Kurusawa film (Kumar has used that quote in the book to make his point).

Through this book, it would be fair to say, Kumar has only tried to present his perspectives on the city where he grew up. He does not make any other claims. “There is no truth in nonfiction; there is only perspective,” he clarifies his stand in the author’s note.

As far as Patna goes, Kumar’s view of the city is that of hopelessness. “I see in Patna’s decline, in its pretensions to development, in its plain dullness, the stark story of middle age and death,” he says. “It’s all hopeless, really—that is what Patna and I are saying to each other.”

Every time the US-based author returns to Patna, he is reminded of his youth (the time of his life when discovery of sex happened for him), and the present question of ageing and mortality (his Patna-based parents are in the last years of their lives). “To return to Patna is to find the challenging thought of death, like the tip of a knife, pressing against my rib,” he writes.

Kumar’s ode to Patna ends on a melancholy note. Some Westerners might see a crumbling Patna as the Indian version of ancient Rome, but he sees this city in a different light—the city where he grew up and where his ageing parents live. “When I step on Patna’s soil, I only want to see how much older my patents look,” he writes. “I arrive in Patna and a few days later I leave. Each time I leave, I wonder about the circumstances under which I will need to return.”

The book, which starts off with a youthful exuberance, ends up with an old age-like gracefulness—understated, sober, melancholic and wise. As I come to the last page of the book, I understand why Kumar calls the book, A Matter of Rats. It is a tribute to the life and people of Patna, rather than an examination of the past and speculation of the future of the capital of Bihar. It is this quality of the book that makes it an endearing read.

Amit Virmani: Audiences need something to keep them engaged

2013-09-15T16:14:00.002+08:00

Singapore-based filmmaker Amit Virmani’s debut, “Cowboys in Paradise”, was one of the most talked-about Asian documentaries in recent years. The controversial film on sex tourism in Bali (Indonesia) garnered international acclaim and has been broadcast in over 110 countries.

His second documentary feature film, “Menstrual Man” (2013), is already making waves. The film documents the struggles of India’s Muruganantham, a school dropout who realised that the majority of women in India couldn’t afford sanitary pads and decided to do something about it. A Netflix audience favourite at Hot Docs 2013, the film underscores the importance of empowering women to combat poverty and highlights the power every individual has to make a difference.

Amit is a graduate of Southwestern University, Texas, where he was honored with the Feminist Voices Award.

Read the interview here

Tiger tales, Neurolinguistics and the power of positive thinking

2013-08-02T17:30:00.000+08:00

Imagine you are standing in front of a tiger. Not in a zoo but in a real forest. And let’s say this tiger is a man-eater.

How would you feel?

You will quake in your boots, right? Clichéd but that’s saying a lot in just five words.

Beyond the surface truth, a lot more stuff happens within your body at that moment. For example, your body diverts 30 percent of your glucose into your blood stream to give you strength to face the danger. The brain releases fear-related hormones. Your heart wants to jump out of your throat. You break into a sweat. And so on.

Now, replace this tiger with your boss. Yes, your boss in the office.

Do you feel the same about your boss? Are you afraid of him? Are you afraid of losing your job?

If you are, then you are living in a condition of constant danger. You are living your life in the shadow of a tiger, and it is damaging your brain. Not just your brain but your entire well-being.

If you do your job well, you should not be afraid of your boss. A good boss needs a good worker like you. He needs you as much as you need him to succeed.

The same goes for your boss—your boss also has a boss in the chain of command. Like you, he too shouldn’t be afraid of his boss. And for the same reason.

So, what’s the point? The point is that a good leader would lead and not just play games with employees to keep his chair intact. A boss who is not like a fear-inducing tiger will ensure more positivity in the office. Positive employees are happy employees and happy employees are productive and loyal employees. I bet you can find plenty of evidence to back that claim.

Neurolinguistics and the power of positive suggestion

The above described scenario didn’t come to me just like that. I recently bumped into a former colleague who now teaches at a bank management institute in India. She is a scholar of Neurolinguistics and she coaches bankers and top banking executives in leadership roles.

In her long career, she said she had seen many professionals damaging themselves because of negative thinking. She had seen this especially in India (she has been working in India after working in Switzerland for many years) where sycophancy and toadyism are considered important traits for survival. You can’t create a healthy working environment if you are not a positive-thinking leader—that’s her point.

Many banking leaders in India love to cling to their chairs so much so that they don’t allow their juniors to be groomed for top positions. What if they become better than me or replace me? That’s their fear.

This shortsightedness has created a leadership vacuum in the banking sector in India—a sector which will see more job creation than the manufacturing sector in the years ahead.

According to her, your negative thoughts induce the release of harmful hormones in your body, making you ill and disease-prone. The language you use affects your brain and its wiring—that is Neurolinguistics in short.

Her prescription? Always think positive. Tell yourself you can do it (let’s say public speaking) and you will be able to do it. Imagine positive scenarios for yourself and believe in them. They will happen. It is as simple as that.

Don’t use the word ‘try’—as in ‘I will try to achieve my goal’. Say, ‘I will achieve my goal’ instead. Don’t let the word ‘try’ become an obstacle in your path to success.

Don’t be afraid of your weaknesses—we all have our weaknesses. Don’t focus on them. Focus on your strengths. When you see Javier Bardem on screen mouthing dialogues in English, you don’t mind his weird accent. You enjoy his acting. Bardem is successful because he is exploiting his strength—his acting abilities. Vladimir Nabokov, the famous novelist, was not a great speaker of English but he wrote some of the most scintillating sentences in the English language. Dr. Abdul Kalam, former President of India, might not have a great accent but he always has great content to share. He focuses on his content and that has made him a darling of people, an inspiring figure.

The choice is yours. You want to think positive and stay healthy or you want to have negative thoughts and damage your brains.

You have to try it to believe it. Promise me that you will think positive today and see how it goes.

Source

Charity screening of 'Menstrual Man' in Singapore

2013-07-29T15:54:00.000+08:00

Singapore-based filmmaker Amit Virmani, who shot to fame with his first film, Cowboys in Paradise, is screening his second documentary film, Menstrual Man, in Singapore on 6 August 2013.

This is a charity screening so friends in Singapore please help this effort. Book your tickets online today!

“Menstrual Man” tells the inspiring story of a man who rose from below the poverty line to stand up for the ignored and forgotten. It underscores the role of social entrepreneurship in combatting poverty, and the importance of economic empowerment of women to enable a better world.

MENSTRUAL MAN
SINGAPORE CHARITY SCREENING
August 6, 2013. 715PM.
Golden Village Great World City
$20
All profits go to MPEVDS, a village development society featured in the film.

More Details here

An evening with a Hollywood editor

2013-07-26T12:28:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, I spent nearly two hours in the company of a veteran Hollywood video editor.

His name is Kris Trexler and he is an Emmy Award winning editor. Los Angeles-based Trexler has been nominated for the Emmy’s five times in his 30-year career. Twice he has won it. He has worked on hit TV shows in the US, such as In Living Color, Ellen, Titus, According to Jim, and Rita Rocks. He has also edited some music videos of Michael Jackson and Tina Turner and has worked on the taped segments of the Academy Awards.

Most recently, Trexler has been editing the hit Disney dance and comedy show, Shake It Up. After three successful seasons, the show is folding up and Trexler has been hired to edit another hot TV show in Hollywood. His new work starts from next month.

Trexler was addressing some local video editors in the Singapore Media Academy (SMA) in a talent forum yesterday. He is a regular visitor to Singapore and he conducts an editing master class here once a year. He also taught editing at Nanyang Polytechnic a couple of years back and loves Singapore as a city.

Trexler is a self-taught editor. He did not go to any film school. He learnt all the tricks of the editing trade on the job.

Trexler started out in his editing career at a time when digital editing was just taking birth. There was a demand for technicians who could learn to edit films (video) on computers and Trexler jumped into the fray. He became one of the pioneers of computerised video editing, using the revolutionary CMX system to edit “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons”, top rated CBS network comedies in the late 1970s.

Ever since, he has been constantly employed. He works for eight months and then takes a four month break. It is during the break that he conducts his editing classes.

Video literacy and editing

Today, video is ubiquitous (thanks to smartphones and YouTube and Facebook) and there are plenty of awfully edited videos on the Internet, he said. If people could learn the basics of editing, they could really improve their home videos.

I call this need video literacy. Today we live in the world of videos—from surveillance footage to our casual videos taken through our iPhones and iPads. They all end up somewhere on the Internet. Like we learnt how to read and write in school, how to use syntax and grammar, the same kind of literacy is required to handle the language of video.

In the SMA forum, most of the discussion centred on editing software.

Trexler lamented how Apple’s Final Cut Pro (FCP) X has disappointed professional editors. FCP was a great piece of editing software and after Apple discontinued FCP 7, it fell out of favour. When Apple had announced FCP X after a hiatus of several years, Trexler was over-excited. He wanted to use it to cut his next project on. When the product was finally released and he downloaded it from the App Store, he was disillusioned with what he saw.

The new version is not convenient for editing longer footage, he said. Creating and using duplicates is a problem with the software. However, he thinks that FCP X is great for editing documentaries.

After his initial rejection, Trexler is slowly coming to terms with FCP X again and is exploring it.

Hollywood is a 100 percent Avid town, Trexler said. All Hollywood editors use Avid to edit their footage. Most Hollywood productions use multi-cam footage (videos shot with four-cameras, A, B, C, and X). It is easier to edit such footage on Avid. Avid also has some unique features which other softwares don’t have, he claimed.

Trexler also appreciated Adobe’s editing software, Premiere. He said the software has evolved over the years and many editors are using it now (though not in Hollywood). Apple’s loss (after the folly of FCP X) has been Adobe Premiere’s gain.

If you are budding video editor, Trexler has one simple advice for you: you should learn both FCP and Avid. If you know how to use FCP, it should not be difficult to learn Avid in a day.

That’s what Trexler thinks. You want to try?

[First published at CIO Asia]

20 things you should be thinking about if you care about journalism

2013-07-04T14:05:00.001+08:00

1. Why don’t we build the audience before we build the product?

2. As technology companies have become media companies, media companies must become technology companies.

3. Are we talking too much about tools and too little about culture change?

4. The future of news design is about how content is created, not how it is presented.

5. Journalists need to be a lot more aware of data security.

6. Who, what, when, where have been commoditised. Journalism needs to focus on why, how, what next.

7. Content is now like water. It’s everywhere. Value comes from packaging it.

8. The many new faces of the unit formerly known as the article. – Circa‘s idea is to «atomise» the article, Fast Company is experimenting with «slow live blogging».

9. The best games for mobile are built for mobile, not adapted from desktop.

10. The metrics for success we use are old, industrial, wrong metrics.

11. What if we made engagement as important as consumption?

12. More people are paying for digital news in 2013 compared to 2012. But still very few.

13. Paywalls are still more wall than pay.

14. Rule if you want people to pay for your content: It doesn’t matter if you value it, but if they value it. Part of our mission is to improve people’s lives. If we do that, revenues will follow.

15. Is it true that if it didn’t happen in English, it didn’t happen at all?

16. The past does not buy our future. Without taking risks, each dollar in profit will turn into $0.56 of loss within 5 years.

17. Bad CEOs and worse editors are using the past to kill our future. See it as your Occupy-moment. Demand change of your bosses.

18. When using social media platforms, ask yourself: 1. Who benefits? 2. Who’s in charge?

19. Your smartphone is your newsroom.

20. The big red button to make the internet go away again: Would you press it?

Top rule: Rule of the internet: It's cheaper and easier to try than to debate about trying.

[Adapted from http://www.davidbauer.ch/2013/06/22/journalism-future-quotes-gen-news-summit/]

The day human privacy died

2013-06-14T11:12:00.000+08:00

When Edward Snowden blew his whistle on the secret big data surveillance system of the US government, called PRISM, I could hear only a murmur of outrage from humanity.

While some knew that the government eavesdrops on our conversations and technology was available to enable this, people in general had no clue about it—the way the vastness of the operation has been unearthed.

Snowden’s revelation—proof of the US government’s secret plan—should have come as a big shock. It was like finding out that your privacy had been bombed out by a drone and you didn’t know about it.

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded,” Snowden said in an interview. “That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

There should have been a tsunami of revolt after the Snowden interview. Instead, all we got were some heroic applauds for Snowden, usual condemnation from the US government and the justifications for the programme by the secret service, and the rest was soon forgotten.

Did you see any action after this?

You know what? Snowden knows that people would be callous, that they will not do anything. He said: “The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things… And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse.”

While Snowden went missing from his hotel in Hong Kong, you moved on with your daily life. You always do.

But, hey, here, take a pause with me. Stop playing that video game for a minute. And consider this.

History will remember this Snowden moment as the day when human privacy died. And if you have not spoken out, your silence will be construed as your acquiescence. You will have to answer to the questions of your children and grandchildren. Why did you not stop it when we were being enslaved?

But do you even care?

Most people are past caring about anything that does not directly affect their well-being—and I applaud the system that they have silently enabled to turn them into this state of emasculation.

Like they stopped caring for what has remained a sham of a concept like democracy. Your government will do what it wants to do. What you think your government should be doing is immaterial.

Like democracy, a lofty concept like privacy has no place in the new world order that you live in. Your addiction to the cyber space has vacuumed out your privacy—it gives you the carbonated sugary drink that you love and crave for but what it does is makes you sick over time. And weakens your will to fight the system.

If you don’t believe in human privacy, you don’t believe in human dignity. And a life without dignity is anything but human. If you don’t get this, go look at yourself in the mirror.

“I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity,” Snowden said in an interview.

In the end, it is all about making choices.

Snowden made a choice and he does not regret it. He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves, he told The Guardian. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

What are the choices that you are going to make? Think about it. Some have already started a campaign. The Mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Reddit, and a host of other organisations are supporting a petition, Stop Watching Us. If you can’t do something on your own, at least join the good side of the battle. Don’t look for a leader. Get started now. Remember what Snowden has said? “I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.”

Kith and Kin: A Portrait of a Southern Indian clan

2013-05-31T11:17:00.001+08:00

I have been trying to take a crack at Sheila Kumar’s collection of short stories Kith and Kin (Rupa, 2012) for a few months but without much success. In between, I read more than half of Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time and then abandoned it—it didn’t seem to go anywhere. I returned his The Finkler Question unread to the library. I flitted from book to book, mostly nonfiction and even dabbled into Manto’s stories for a while. But I could barely finish a novel (managed to read three chapters of Buddenbrooks). And all this while, Kith and Kin, sitting on my bookshelf, excoriated me for being so fiendish and obtuse. I became my own nightmare.

Then I came across an opening, a mental pass, that offered me some redemption. Or cut me some slack, if you go for the less dramatic.

I was travelling and I carried Kumar’s book to give it one more try. Luckily, this time the book yielded to me. Is the mind more receptive to new experiences when one is traveling at 30,000 feet above the ground? Is the airborne mind so tremulous with unexpected disasters that it is eager to absorb anything new? Anything that can distract the mind is a welcome absorption at that altitude.

During the two hours of flight time, I could read Kumar’s stories and enjoy some of them.

Kith and Kin contains 19 stories about the Melekat clan of Kerala. Ammini Amma is the matriarch of the clan and Mon Repos is the matriarch’s house in south Malabar. The various members of this clan— three generations of brothers and sisters and their grandchildren—inhabit different cities in India. This is a proud clan, with beauty running in the genes, but with some customary exceptions.

Through these stories, Kumar explores a range of human emotions, both carnal and spiritual and always with a touch of wit and humour. In Kingfisher Morning, for example, Sindhu’s affair with Deepender comes to an abrupt end when she finds out that he was two-timing with Seema, her own sister, in Delhi. There is even a slow-mo moment when this discovery takes place but instead of feeling blue after encountering her sister, Sindhu thinks of Seema’s hairy armpits. Deepender loathes women with hairy pits. “Hope Seema has done something about hers,” she contemplates.

Some stories in the collection end with a twist in the tale which feels contrived. In All Those Doors, Anita, a journalist, goes to interview a famous theatre and film actor—‘a thinking woman’s sex symbol’ who has retreated to the hills near Coimbatore. The interview goes very well and Anita imagines a life with this famous person—an opposite of the shallow Chetan, her boyfriend of two years.

As Anita leaves the house after the interview, the actor goes back into his house to surf kiddy porn. Some might think this is a clever ending but there is this sudden shift in the point of view which is jarring.

In these stories, Kumar shows her flair for comic writing. But this is not the sort of comic writing that reminds you of early Naipaul; nor does it display the chutzpah of Rushdie’s literary playfulness.

To Kumar’s credit, she draws most scenes well and some of her passages are expertly well-written. However, her prose is overwrought at places and she barely exercises restraint, resulting in overexposing her characters. Also, there are far too many references to contemporary books, writers and film stars in these stories. It is possible that Kumar prefers Woody Allen over Hemingway. But all her stylistic choices mar an otherwise readable collection of short stories which could have been a deeper study of a Southern Indian clan.

India’s population: Boon or bane?

2013-05-29T07:17:00.002+08:00

If you are an Indian child of the 1970s and 80s, you would remember the ‘population explosion’ scare of that era. During the days of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government (1966-77 and 1980-84), India’s bulging population was seen a threat to the country’s future so much so that Indira’s son, Sanjay Gandhi, ran an controversial campaign of forced sterilization during the emergency (1975-77).

“India’s large and growing population has long been seen as a problem, perhaps even the most important long-term problem facing the country,” writes Singapore-based economist Sanjeev Sanyal, currently Deutsche Bank’s Global Strategist, in his book, The Indian Renaissance. “This is not surprising given the sustained increase in population in the second half of the 20^th century—from 361 million in 1951 to around 1.1 billion in 2007. Between 1951 and 1991, the country’s population grew at an average rate of over 2 percent per year.”

In the 1970s and 80s, this fast clip of population growth was an alarming problem for India because the country was growing only at the rate of 3.5 percent. This led the government of the day to pursue a policy of population control and family planning.

But come the 1990s and the tone of the government changes. India’s population explosion was no more seen as a problem. It was touted as “the population dividend.”

How did this turnaround happen?

“The Prime Minister had himself announced in parliament that India’s population, criticised for being a curse, is actually a boon,” says noted economist Dr. Amir Ullah Khan, Deputy Director, Strategy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, India. “The 600 million strong workforce does not just provide cheap labour, it also is the largest provider of skilled manpower in the world. It is the youngest population in the world with a mean age of 24 years, in a globe that is ageing pretty fast. The large population, with its striking diversity that is not seen in the stark homogeneity of China, offers the world a variety of skills in terms of languages spoken, technology education and adaptability in disparate environments. With the millions of Indians now going to school and getting skilled, India is the largest provider of engineers (more than half a million annually) and English speaking professionals in the world.”

With middle class population in excess of 300 million, India is the largest market for automobiles, high value foods, mobile phones etc ahead of or just behind China.

“This turn around has happened as education levels have gone up - nearly 98% of children are enrolled in primary schools now,” says Khan. “Also because of the fall in fertility rates, an average Indian family now has less than three children compared to five a couple of decades ago, leading to increased expense on education and health per child.”

The dependency ratio

Demographic accelerations and decelerations have huge impacts on a country’s economic performance, and that’s where the secret lies of understanding why India’s population boom is a boon.

“The dependency ratio (the ratio of the population outside the working age group relative to the population in the working age) is the key,” says Prasenjit K Basu, MD and Head of Asia (regional) Research & Economics at Maybank Kim Eng Holdings, Singapore. “As the dependency ratio falls, a nation’s savings rate typically rises (as long as those of working age are mostly employed!). If the nation’s savings rate rises, so should its investment/GDP ratio, and a rise in the latter boosts productivity and therefore prosperity. This is the virtuous circle that Japan entered in the 1950-90 period (when its dependency ratio was steadily declining), and Korea did from 1965-2010, China from 1978-2013 (the dependency ratio there is going to start rising from next year). And India is in the middle of its demographic dividend phase (the period of declining dependency ratios) which will last from 1990 to 2035.”

A boon turning out to be a bane?

However, not all economists see India’s burgeoning population as a boon.

“The demographic dividend that we talk about is actually turning out to be bane for India, because of lack of skill or employability on part of the Indian labors,” argues Nilanjan Banik, Professor at Institute for Financial Management and Research, Chennai Area, India. “Consider this. In the private sector, approximately 10 to 15 million jobs were created in 2011-12 but not all could not be filled up as 75 per cent of this jobs required skill such as vocational training which are not to be found among the prospective applicants. Be it doctors, engineers, or even MBA graduates, there is a dearth of quality professionals in India. This is precisely why every year corporates like Infosys (service), ITC (manufactured consumer items), Apollo (medical), and L&T (engineering), to name a few, are left with vacant seats, or prefer to recruit people with foreign degrees, rather than employ graduates from India.”

“This year’s Economic Survey puts the jobs question at the forefront and for all the right reasons,” says Dr. Rajesh Chakrabarti, Executive Director, Bharti Institute of Public Policy, and Clinical Associate Professor, Indian School of Business, Mohali, Punjab, India. “It is not clear that India will be able to create the kind of jobs in sufficient numbers to employ its millions.”

“The point is higher number can not be sustained as a boon,” says Dr. Debashis Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi. “There needs to be skill-formation for smooth progression and human development aumgmentation has a crucial role there.”

What can be done?

“In this regard, Indian policymakers should take a lesson from the growth performance of the newly industrialised economies in Asia, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, which is typically driven by designing curriculum, so that more people can be employed,” says Dr. Banik. “In India, on the other hand, government regulation in higher education is actually hindering supply of quality education.”

“What India needs is rapid skill development to ready its growing population for the marketplace for jobs,” says Dr. Chakraborty. “That is the critical challenge.”

“India now will have to take a call whether we want to be a manufacturing hub (e.g. like China) or service hub (e.g. Singapore)?” he says. “Once we are ourselves clear on that front, appropriate education and training policies can be devised to reap demographic dividend.”

These arguments are in line with a report, ‘State of the Urban Youth, India 2012: Employment, Livelihoods, Skills,’ published by IRIS Knowledge Foundation in collaboration with UN-HABITAT.

The report suggests that unequal access to opportunity and the lack of emphasis on education remains a persistent problem in India. While the country is undergoing a demographic transition, regional disparities in education mean the benefits will not be evenly spread across the country. That, if one may say, is the fine irony of India’s population boon.

India

’s population-related trends at a glance

India is currently the second most populous country in the world, with over 1.21 billion people (2011 census)—this represents more than a sixth of the world’s population.

Every third person in an Indian city today is a youth.

India is projected to be the world’s most populous country by 2025, surpassing China. It’s population will reach 1.6 billion by 2050.

India has more than 50 percent of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65 percent below the age of 35.

By 2020, India is set to become the world’s youngest country with 64 per cent of its population in the working age group.

In about seven years, the median individual in India will be 29 years.

The population in the age-group of 15-34 increased from 353 million in 2001 to 430 million in 2011. Current predictions suggest a steady increase in the youth population to 464 million by 2021 and finally a decline to 458 million by 2026.

India is set to experience a dynamic transformation as the population burden of the past turns into a demographic dividend, but the benefits will be tempered with social and spatial inequalities—according to a report the ‘State of the Urban Youth, India 2012: Employment, Livelihoods, Skills,’ published by IRIS Knowledge Foundation in collaboration with UN-HABITAT.

The report says the southern and western States will be the first to experience a growth dividend as they accounted for 63 per cent of all formally trained people. The largest share of youth with formal skills was found in Kerala, followed by Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. Among those undergoing training, Maharashtra had the highest share, Bihar the lowest.

[This article was published in Tabla! Singapore in May 2013 and should not be reproduced without the permission of SPH]

Hair and the Indian

2013-05-29T07:12:00.000+08:00

Hair now and gone tomorrow. That’s the story of hair, in short, for most Indians. In between (one is telescoping time here), there is a long struggle to hold on to the heritage one is born with it. Most fail at it, but some go to incredible lengths to preserve the luxuriant foliage on one’s pate.

Both Indian men and women love their hair, but women obviously love them more. Long tresses that are shiny and healthy are a mark of good health and beauty. Traditionally, Indian men like women who have black and long hair. Indian poetry is full of praise for the long-tressed beauty. Look at the Indian film actresses: from the beginning of cinema, they have sported long hair, and their dense, silky locks have set nationwide trends in hairstyles. Remember the fringe of actress Sadhna (popularly known as the Sadhna cut) in the 1960s? Or for men, the Dev Anand style ‘puff’ hair, the Amitabh Bachchan style middle-parted hair or more recently, Salman Khan and Amir Khan’s ever-changing hairstyles? They have been ardently copied by their countrymen.

While both men and women in

India

loved their hair, the fact is that men cared a little less about maintaining their hair. Even though they wanted their hair to be thick, black, and luxuriant, they didn’t do much about it. There was a time, when a ‘champi’ (hair oil massage) was all that a man needed, and even today, hair oil is an everyday habit with about 50 percent of the population. Older men put henna in their hair. Over the decades, however, as with their interest, their options have evolved. Now they have a variety of oils, shampoos, conditioners, and post wash products to choose from. In addition, most Indian men turn to dyes to hide their grey hair when they begin to age.

A testimony to this Indian obsession with hair is the growing hair care market. According to industry figures, the size of the hair care market is Rs 13,000 crore (US$2413 million), of which Rs 6664 crore (US$1237) is the size of the hair oil market alone. This is such a huge market that top Bollywood actors like Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, and Amitabh Bachchan have been endorsing hair oil brands, earning crores of rupees in fees.

“In the last five years, the hair oil industry has been registering healthy double digit growth mainly due to increasing hair damages due to lifestyle and environmental changes,” Minoo Phakey, marketing head, hair oil, Dabur India, told an Indian newspaper.[1]

But many Indian men don’t stop with hair oil when it comes to preserving their youthful look. They are turning to even hair weaving and hair transplant treatments, even though these are highly expensive procedures. A typical hair transplant, a painful process, costs about Rs. 1.5 lakh (about $4,000). Today when incomes have risen in

India

, well-to-do men can afford such treatments. Thankfully, there is no dearth of role models for them: Akshaye Khanna, Sunny Deol, Dharmendra, Rajnikanth, Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan from the Bollywood brigade and Virendra Sehwag, Ravi Shastri and Harsha Bhogle from the cricketing world have all gone for hair weaving and transplants at some point of their career.

From Hair to Eternity—Hair and rituals in Indian culture

In a deeply religious and spiritual country like

India

, hair is not just a part of one’s outer personality. It has its own spiritual dimensions. For Sikh men, for example, maintaining their hair and keeping their beard is part of their religious identity. Both Hindus and Muslims in

India

shave off their hair at different points of time for spiritual reasons and it starts right after birth. Muslims shave off their children’s birth hair within weeks after their birth and donate in charity gold or silver equal in weight to the hair.

For Hindus, the hair from birth is associated with undesirable traits from past lives. So, it is believed that the child’s ‘mundan’ ritual frees him or her of her past. Hindu men go for a tonsure when they lose a parent.

Hindus also offer their hair as a sacrifice to their gods, and they do it for a variety of reasons, ranging from seeking good luck and riches to ward off sickness and unfavourable circumstances. The practice is common in southern

India

, especially at temples such as the famous Tirumala Venkateswara Temple of Lord Vishnu, where people flock from all parts of

India

to be shaved.

Splitting the hair

Where does all this hair go? That is a million dollar question. That brings us to the world of the big business of hair. Temple hair donation has made

India

the world leader in the hair extension trade.

When devotees offer their hair to the gods, temples auction them off to wholesalers, who in turn export them to countries like the

and the

where demand for Indian hair is high— Hollywood actresses such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian have pushed up demand for hair extensions. Hair extensions make women feel glamorous—that’s the prevailing belief.

The practice of selling human hair is a good source of income for the temples. The money raised is used for charitable activities. And the prices are good: one kilogram of Indian hair can bring in as much as $250 on average; it would have fetched $20 15 years ago, according to a people in the trade. Last year Tirumala temple, apparently made 2,000m rupees (more than £22m), from auctioning hair[2].

So, there is more to hair than what meets the eyes. For Indians, hair is not just a matter of beauty and good looks, it is also a symbol of devotion. It can be safely said that as

India

evolves and redefines its culture, the Indian love affair with hair will continue. Probably we will see more funky hairdos in

India

but the fashion police will also be equally ruthless.

Hair is big business

Today, hair is big business the world over. Both the young and the old in the West turn to hair extensions and hair addition. The young go for coloured extensions while the middle-aged ladies opt for it to create a glamorous effect.

According to approximate figures from U.N. Comtrade, the U.S. imported over US$900 million-worth of wigs, false beards, eyebrows, eyelashes and similar products in 2010, while the U.K. imported $79 million-worth and China and Hong Kong $71 million.

There is high demand for Indian hair for wig making and hair extensions. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal,

India

exported $190 million-worth of hair and related hair products in 2009-10 and could more than double that to $470 million by 2013-14. The newspaper sourced these figures from the Department for Commerce and Industry, Government of India.

Indian hair is preferred because it is both “thin and strong”. Indian temple hair is valued because, according to one report, most of the temple hair donors are rural women. In most cases, their hair has never been dyed, blow-dried, or even cut.

The temples first sort the donated hair and then sell it through online auctions. According to Chennai-based Curlsnwaves, one of the country’s largest exporters of hair, the acquired hair is first processed, stripped of colour and re-dyed before being exported.

Hair extension is not just a fashion abroad—Indian women are also embracing it. “Hair is the first thing an Indian woman would look after,” says a Mumbai-based hairstylist in the Aljazeera documenrtaty film, Witness—Hair

India

. “More than her skin. Indian woman are obsessed with length. They all like to have their hair extended.”

[1] http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/Markets/A-black-shiny-market/Article1-889575.aspx

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/oct/28/hair-extension-global-trade-secrets

[Published in Tabla! Singapore in April 2013. This article should not be reproduced without the permission of SPH]

On Boston Bombings: A Convoluted Narrative of Terror

2013-04-22T00:19:00.001+08:00

In the last few days, the developments of the Boston marathon bombing case have dominated the international media coverage.

The attacks took everyone by surprise.

We had all become complacent about terror attacks on the US soil and we thought these were a thing of the past. There hadn't been any major terror attack in the States by Jehadists since 9/11. In fact, the danger was more from demented shooters who went postal from time to time and killed innocent children and adults, their fellow citizens.

When I heard of the Boston attacks, I had a sense of foreboding just like I had it when the Twin Towers fell more than a decade ago. Only the scale was smaller this time. But its security repercussions might be deeper and more widespread. When and how this will pan out only time will tell.

For now, the Boston Bombings are a reminder that the US territory is still not safe. That terrorism is still able to cast its dark shadow on the American people. The bombers had the temerity to carry out the attacks in public, at the site of a world famous marathon.

Why did this attack happen? Was it meant to intimidate people? Did it contain a message? Who was behind the attacks? Everyone wanted to know about the attackers and their motive. President Obama, very rightly, asked people to hold their guns and not jump to ready-made conclusions. The suspects included people who opposed Obama's gun control legislation.

Whoever was behind the attacks, the attacks were condemned, and characterized as acts of cowardice. The world expressed solidarity with the victims of the bombings. On the other side of the globe, on the same day, 14 people died in Afghanistan in terror attacks and I doubt if anyone heard about it. Yahoo did this story, Boston attacks are reminder of violence elsewhere, to make us aware of the violence elsewhere.

Major manhunt

After the attacks took place on Monday 15 April, the security forces started a major manhunt. Finally, on Friday 19 April, two Chechen brother were captured--one dead, another alive. Police identified the suspects as brothers Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 (Suspect One), who died in hospital, and Dzhokhar Tsarnev, 19 (Suspect Two), who remained at large and was later captured.

According to US security forces and Boston police, these two brothers were behind the attacks. Their photos and videos at the marathon site with backpacks established their guilt. Further guilt was underlined when the elder brother killed a police officer in pursuit before he himself died in a gun battle. The younger one, 19, had partied the night before he was captured hiding in a boat. He had even tweeted: I'm a stress-free kind of a guy. Are these the tell tale signs of a terrorist? Why did they defy the typical terrorist stereotype?

Except for the fact that the elder brother was interviewed by the FBI in 2011 (for suspected Chechen terrorist links), on the request of the Russian government, there was no other evidence of his involvement in terror activities. If there was anything else, that information has not come out into the public. The mother and father of the accused have said that their sons are innocent and that they have been set up by the security agency, FBI. The Guardian reports:

The FBI's previous contacts with one of the alleged Boston bombers have come under intense scrutiny as questions were raised about whether it missed vital clues that could have prevented the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 170.

As questions were raised about how well known the brothers were to federal investigators, their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said that the FBI had spoken to the family on multiple occasions. In an interview broadcast by Russia Today before the end of the manhunt on Friday, Tsarnaeva, a naturalised US citizen, said FBI agents had spoken to her in the past.
"They were telling me that Tamerlan was really an extremist leader and they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremists' sites." Tsarnaeva, speaking from Dagestan, claimed that the FBI were monitoring her son "at every step", and had been "controlling" him for three to five years. She did not give specific dates.

How far are these claims true? No media agency has so far investigated these claims. They have only reported them. In India, we have seen many cases of young people getting implicated in terror attacks or even being killed in fake encounters and later on it turns out that they were innocent citizens (read the Muslim Question at Tehelka). The Tsarnaev brothers could well be the Boston bombers but so far they are only the accused in this case, according to the US media.

If the brothers were trained terrorists, the motive behind the attacks was not clear. Why should Chechen rebels attack Americans? Their enemies would be Russians, not Americans. It does not make much sense. The New York Times reports today:

The brothers’ motives are still unclear. Of Chechen heritage, they had lived in the United States for years, according to friends and relatives, and no direct ties have been publicly established with known Chechen terrorist or separatist groups. While Dzhokhar became a naturalized American citizen last year, Tamerlan was still seeking citizenship. Their father, Anzor, said Tamerlan had made last year’s trip to renew his Russian passport.

The NYT said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months in Dagestan in 2012, and analysts said that sojourn might have marked a crucial step in his alleged path toward the bombings.

The other narrative

Curiously, some alternative media in the US are pointing fingers at the security agencies for possible prior knowledge of the attacks. Almost a year ago, the NYT had run this story: Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.

Pointing at the insinuations of this story, some alternative media outlets have reported that there was a security drill at the marathon site on the same day and there were private security people with black backpacks there too but the US agencies have so far discounted that angle. Mainstream media, however, has not confirmed this. In fact, what seems to be an attempt to the discredit such views, CBS News had its twitter channel hacked with messages implicating the US government of hiding the truth behind the Boston bombings. The BBC reports:

CBS Twitter accounts hacked by 'pro-Damascus group'
The Twitter accounts for two CBS news programmes in the US have been suspended after being hacked. Fake messages appearing on the @60Minutes account criticised US support for "terrorist" rebels in Syria and others accused Barack Obama of trying to "take away your guns". A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army claimed to have been responsible for hijacking the accounts.
The fake messages that appeared on the @60Minutes account reportedly included:
"The US government is hiding the real culprit of the Boston bombing"
"The US government is sponsoring a coup in Venezuela and a terrorist war in Syria"
"Your duty is to protect your nation from the parasites that have taken your government"
"Obama wants to destroy the Syrian and American people. We must stop this beast"

Meanwhile, DEBKAfile, an Israeli intelligence analysis site, has reported that the Tsarnaev brothers were double agents who decoyed US into terror trap.

The conclusion reached by DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.

Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks.

By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus.

I could not find any mention of this in the mainstream US media. This could be mere speculation at this stage but who knows how twisted the truth is?

I have no sympathy for terrorists of any hue but I also don't like simple bedtimes stories when it comes to a deadly issue like solving the crime behind terror attacks. This convoluted narrative of the Boston bombing terror attack must not be allowed to have loose ends. If there is more than what meets the eye, then that truth must also come out in public.

Anuradha Kumar: A writer to watch

2013-04-08T12:44:00.001+08:00

Anuradha Kumar is one of those rare writers who straddle the worlds of writing for children and adults with equal ease. Today, when the publishing market is competitive and segmented and subdivided like never before, finding success in more than one genre is not easy–and the fact that Anu sails successfully in more than one genre is a testament to her huge talent. Yet she started out without much ambition, as she mentions in this interview with Kitaab. “I started writing stories when I found myself bored in the corporate world, then submitted these to online magazines and then I just wanted to do more,” she says.

Anu’s first book was In Search Of A Raja And Other Stories published by Writers Workshop. This was followed by The Dollmakers’ Island and Letters for Paul. Her most recent novel is, It Takes a Murder (Hachette). In between all these novels, she has published many successful books for children. Eminent author and scholar Pankaj Mishra has described her as a writer to watch. Read this interview and you will know why.

Read the full interview here.

P. Sainath to speak at AMU

2013-03-07T13:40:00.000+08:00

The I G Khan Memorial Trust

& Club for Short Evening Courses, GEC, AMU

invites you to
The lives of others: Stories of Workers
P. Sainath
Yeh Hum Kyun Sahein
Yeh Hum Kyun Sahein

Saturday March 9th 2013
Saturday March 9th 2013

‘India and the age of inequality’

Lecture by noted journalist P. Sainath

11 AM / Kennedy Auditorium

panel discussion with

Prof Madih ur Rehman Sherwani

Janwadi Rickshaw Chalak Unio

AV presentation – AMU students

2.30 PM / Lecture Theatre, GEC

a play by

Jana Natya Manch

4.30 PM / GEC Lawns

Screening of feature film

Do Bigha Zameen

Presented by Rinki Roy Bhattacharya

5.30 PM / Kennedy Auditorium

ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY / ALIGARH

www.igkhan.org

http://www.facebook.com/groups/igkhanmemorial/

Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival – Part 2

2013-02-14T14:50:00.002+08:00

25 January 2013

On the second day of JLF 2013, I attended two sessions: one by Faramerz Dabhoiwala on The Origins of Sex and another by Jawed Akhtar on Bollywood and the National Narrative.

Faramerz Daboiwala on The Origins of Sex

Faramerz was in conversation with William Dalrymple. Dalrymple introduced the teacher at Oxford in most glowing terms and then took a back seat.

Faramerz made the following main points, in relation to his book, The Origins of Sex. The book was based on his PhD thesis and portrays the history of sexuality and sexual mores in the last two hundred years.

- Sexual revolution did not start in the 1960s. It started in 18th century England.

- Then, sex outside marriage was not acceptable at all; vigilante groups looked for any couple who indulged in extramarital sex and presented them to the courts. They were punished, flogged and paraded naked on streets. Listening to him, I began to realize how the West sees many Muslim societies today: two centuries ago, they weren’t any different from them (from what we see and hear about sexual crimes in the Arab or other Muslim societies).

- Aristocrats in England started demanding that they be allowed to have a private sex life separate from their public life.

- Courtesans were the first celebrities. They published memoirs and were scandal mongers. Their memoirs sold in large numbers making them money to survive in old age. They also blackmailed aristocrats and threatened to expose them in public.

- A famous courtesan (who is on the cover of Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s book) ordered her painting and published stamp sized prints for men to carry them in their watches (like today's cellphones)

- There were people who wrote books anonymously, published them and wrote glowing reviews of their own books.

Javed Akhtar on Bollywood and National Narrative

Well-known lyricist and scriptwriter Javed Akhtar was in conversation with film historian Rachel Dwyer.

- Javed Akhtar said that when they (he and Salim) were writing scripts, they did not know that they were creating a phenomenon (The Angry Young Man of the 1970s). They were just writing good stories. Only in hindsight did they know that their works were path-breaking, and that they were defining a generation. What were their heroes rebelling against? Very minor things, like, they wanted to marry the girl of their choice; it was a rebellion against their parents. They did not touch any institution.

- Being a film lyricist, Javed Saheb dwelled heavily on the devolution of lyrics in Hindi cinema. He said that film songs earlier had tehzeeb (courtesy, a cultivated manner and civility) in them; now that etiquette is gone. In the past, even B-grade films' songs had a soul, poetry in their lines.

- You have to be kindhearted to say today's lyrics are poetry.

- We are also responsible for degeneration of our films and songs: Choli ke peeche kya hai (the suggestive but popular song from Subhash Ghai’s film, Khalnayak) was made by 9 people; who made it a hit? Who were the other 9 crore people? At homes, people proudly told me, he said, see my 8-yr old can dance so well on Choli ke peeche kya hai? What does that say about us as parents? Where are we going as a society?

- Our Vocabulary has shrunk; proverbs have died; we have replaced them with poor language and some bad American words, not even proper English.

- Today's kids have less than half the vocabulary of their parents.

- Only the poor go to vernacular schools, so they use cheap language, it gets reflected in our cinema, giving it even more credibility.

- Good and bad films were always made: but in the past, most hits were good films; today, most hits are bad films. Show me a good film that has done a business of 200 crores?

- Some young filmmakers are making quality films today. It is good. (Examples: Farhan Akhtar, Zoya Akhtar)

- We had abandoned language and arts in the last 30-40 years. We wanted cars and fridges. Now today's generation takes them for granted. They want something else. They want arts, and literature, so (that’s why we see) this revival of arts and literature in India.

- I am not pessimistic. In the next ten years, we will make even better films which will have better aesthetic quality.

Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival – Part 1

2013-02-08T09:31:00.002+08:00

[Random Shots: Journalist and novelist Tarun Tejpal interacting with his readers at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2013]

24 January 2013

On the first day, I attended three sessions: the Art of the Short Story, Ismat and Annie, and the Novel of the Future. I did not take any notes. I wrote down the following the next morning (from whatever I could remember). If some statements sound weird and don’t make sense to the readers, I take the blame for sloppiness and apologize in advance.

We don't tell novels, we tell short stories

The Short story: The Art of the Short Story panel had Nicholas Hogg, Richard Beard and Yiyun Li and Anjum Hasan was the moderator.

- Yiyun Li said show and tell is a wrong advice

- Bring the narrator back

- She said she represents only herself (not any group or community as a writer)

- Length in a story does not matter; she refused to reduce the length of a story just to get into The New Yorker

Anjum Hasan referred to the Chekhovian Little Man (mentioned Frank O'Connor's book on short stories)

- Why do you write short stories: The panelists said that one is able to explore other lives through short stories

- Short stories are great as a genre as they allow great room for experimentation (for example, the stories of Georges Perec)

The panelists were of the opinion that short story as a genre is not dying; it will live as long as there will be human beings. It is very natural for us—we don't tell novels, we tell short stories

Ismat and Annie

This session was about two famous Urdu fiction writers: Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Haider.

In this session, Javed Akhtar and Ameena Saiyid (head of OUP,

Pakistan

) were in conversation with Syed Shahid Mahdi.

Javed Akhtar: Both Ismat and Annie (Haider) were rebels in their own way. Annie was from an aristocratic background and was scholarly; if she was confident about something, she would put her foot down. Otherwise, she would say I don't know anything about it; tell me about it. She would quote from magazines and books. She would think in terms of centuries.

Ismat was more from a middle class background. She was a fighter and was so dogged that even if she had said something wrong and she knew it, she would stick to her point. She thought in terms of mosaic, short stories.

In this session, Javed Saheb said some very interesting things about the Urdu and Hindi divide, which he considers an artificial divide. He said that what we commonly speak in

India

is Urdu or Hindustani. But what is people’s attitude? When do they think one is speaking Urdu and not Hindi? “Jab kah (baat) samajh me aaye toh who Hindi hai. Jab samajh me aana band ho jaye toh Urdu hai.”

He exhorted people to learn Urdu if they wanted to enjoy the works of genii like Ismat and Annie. “Learning Urdu is not that difficult,” he said. “Learn the script. Don’t just look at the script and run away scared. Doosre ki galiyan hamesha tedhi medhi lagti hain.”

In the futuristic scenario, everybody is a writer, no one is reader

“The Novel of the Future” was a very interesting session. The participants were Howard Jacobson, Nadeem Aslam, Linda Grant, Zoe Heller and Lawrence Norfolk and the moderator was Anita Anand. Mohammad Hanif was supposed to be a part of the panel but he did not show up. Later on, I found out that he got his visa too late in the day and cancelled his plans to come to Jaipur.

The discussion opened with a reference to the famous Naipaulian claim that the novel is dead. Long ago Naipaul had declared that the novel is dead.

Nadeem Aslam: The novel's health is not exhausted in my study. If you say the novel is exhausted, it means you are exhausted.

Howard Jacobson: Looking at the success of Fifty Shades (the trilogy by E L James), we are doomed.

The problem is with readers, not novels

Everyone wants to write, not read

Meeting authors has replaced necessity to read

We need novels. It is an argument, not a single voice of dictatorship.

In the futuristic scenario, everybody is a writer, no one is reader.

Anna Karenina is a young adult novel.

Don't change your writing to suit the market; stick to your style, at any cost, and your audience will change

Zoe Heller: What is worrying is that kids are losing the art of reading long fiction; they have short attention spans.

What's happening in the

will happen in

India

too. The market for novels is shrinking in the

. The same will happen in

India

in the future even though right now the market here is expanding.

Howard: Don’t read novels for information. Novels have no information to provide.

Others

Someone asked: What about the novel in the e-form, with embedded video and all that jazz we could do with the form in a digital age? Answer: Novels will change—like a parachute, with trimmed strings. Will the parachute remain the same and will provide the same functionality if you trimmed it strings?

E-books are not same as the hard copy novels.

Nadeem: You don’t need video and music to be embedded in the novel’s pages. The words, the sentences, they should evoke the music and picture in your head.

Voices from the Jaipur Literature Festival

2013-02-07T11:45:00.000+08:00

There was a time when

India

barely had any literary festivals. There were readings and book launches, there were mushairas and kavi sammelans but not literary festivals—it is a western import like the ‘novel’.

Just as there is an epidemic of novel-writing in

India

these days, there is also an outbreak of literary festivals in the country. Every city worth its salt has a lit fest going on and writers, publishers and readers aren’t exactly complaining. In

India

, when we like something, we tend to go overboard. The same is true of lit fests. But I hope we stop at the city level and don’t take literary festivals to the mohalla level. A Kirti Nagar literary festival or a Jorbagh lit fest does not sound right. A reading group would be much more appropriate at that level.

I was recently in Chennai and one of my friends told me that his daughter who is in third standard wants to become a writer. That’s great, I said. When I was in school, I could barely get my head around what was happening in the classroom, let alone think of becoming a writer.

India

’s new generation will take the country to another level. Who will not welcome such glad tidings about

India

On my way to the Jaipur literature festival (JLF) this January, I was pondering why was there so much growing interest in reading and writing in

India

now? Why so many literary festivals? While this is a welcome pandemic, there must be some robust reasons behind it.

I found the answer in one of the sessions by Javed Akhtar Saheb, who is a well-known poet, screenplay writer and Hindi film lyricist. His name has become synonymous with JLF. He and Gulzar Saheb (though the latter was absent this year or maybe I missed him at the festival) have been crowd-pulling festival regulars.

In one of his sessions, Javed Saheb had this to say about the revival of our interest in the arts: “We had abandoned language and arts in the last 30-40 years. We wanted cars and fridges. Now today's generation takes them for granted. They want something else. They want arts, and literature, and so this revival.” What he says makes sense. Perhaps it is even true. But is this view too simplistic?

I am asking this because a danger lurks around the corner of this insight. While lit fests are an endearing feature of a changing

India

(along with the nationwide ban on plastic bags), they could signal something else altogether and “Booker-award winning” novelist Howard Jacobson had this point to make which is equally convincing: Today, we have more writers than readers. We complain of the death of the novel. But the problem is with readers, not novels. Everyone wants to write, and no one wants to read. Meeting authors has replaced the necessity of reading.

He had made this point in one of his columns too—I remember reading it. He was, in his column, referring to a literary city like London. The point he is making it this—are literary festivals replacing the reading habit? Is meeting authors, listening to their talks and getting their autographs enough to qualify us to skip the hard work of actually reading their books?

On a panel discussion on the future of the novel, Howard Jacobson was at his cantankerous best, and I loved everything he said. Howard was among the three writers this year who drew me to the festival—the other two were Yiyun Li and Musharraf Ali Farooqi. I admire all three of them (I heard them but did not meet them in person; I did not even take their picture. I just listened to them and took mental notes).

This was my first time at JLF and the festival was as colourful and cacophonous as I had expected it to be. In its first edition years ago, it had attracted 7,000 people. This time the organizers said footfall was about 2 lakhs (Sounds like a mall, doesn’t it?). Getting a seat was always a problem at the festival but people were unfazed. They fought for seats.

While the festival attracts top writers from all over the world, one reason for its popularity is Bollywood. Members of

India

’s film fraternity are an integral part of the festival (Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Prasoon Joshi, Shabana Azmi, and this year Neelesh Misra too was introduced to the public). Not satisfied with their popularity, this year the festival organisers added cricket and religion to the mix to a great effect. We had Dalai Lama and Rahul Dravid at the fest who injected a dose of spirituality and sports into the milieu in their own way.

But this was not everybody’s idea of how a lit fest should be. At the same time when Dravid’s session was going on, eminent Hindi writers like Ashok Chakradhar, Ikraam Rajasthani and Atul Kanakk were holding a session on ‘Navras’. The crowd was going hysterical on Dravid’s side (Tata Steel lawns). Ashok made us do a ‘ho ho’ too as a counterpunch to the other side’s level of enthusiasm: it was cricket vs Hindi and the audience did not let Hindi down. It was good fun.

To enter the venue, one had to go through many security checks. But this was not that unpleasant, and once inside, you were in for a treat. Colourful tents, sunshine, bookstores, art and craft shops, people with elongated lenses attached to their cameras, autograph hunters, writers, and food for thought. A lot was going on inside the barricaded Diggi Palace. Besides the chai in earthen cups and pyaaz kachodi with delicious chutney, there was a variety of food available at Diggi Palace. Unfortunately, smoking was banned on the second day but we saw many foreigners smoking away, oblivious to the promised fine of Rs 200 that had been imposed on those who smoked inside the festival venue. When my friend complained to the police, they said, “Kya Karen Saheb? Yeh toh foreigners hain.” (What to do, sir? These are foreigners). My desi friend’s cigarettes had been impounded at the entrance of the Diggi Palace and so he was angry. If JLF organizers are reading this, they should designate smoking areas at the festival venue. Smokers will smoke and if you force them to do it surreptitiously, they become fire hazards. So please, be a little more practical.

The auto wallahs had a field day during the festival. They happily overcharged us everyday from the venue (some 7 kilometers) to our hotel. They justified the overcharging by saying that the traffic is very bad because of the police bandobast. Many fellow attendees I talked to said that orgainsers should arrange bus service to hotels. Another great suggestion.

I had hoped to meet Musharraf Ali Farooqi (whose work of translation, The Adventures of Amir Hamza, I had been enjoying) at the Random House party on January 25 but unfortunately the party was moved to another day because it fell on a dry day. I had to return to Delhi the next day, so I missed the party altogether. We were, however, on the same flight from Delhi to Jaipur and that was a consoling thought.

On the way back to Delhi, I saw newsman Rajdeep Sardesai (CNN-IBN) boarding our plane. He kept to himself and after landing in Delhi, on the bus to the terminal, I got a seat right in front of him. A lady with a toddler was too excited to see him and when she could not contain her excitement, she asked the man: Are you Rajdeep Sardesai? Rajdeep politely smiled and nodded yes. The woman beamed for a while at this affirmation. Soon, we reached the airport terminal and went our separate ways.

During the festival, I did not mob anyone for autographs. I did not buy any books as I had already ordered the books that I wanted to buy through Flipkart. All I had were some good memories, and there were voices from the festival that echoed in my head. I was glad that this year the festival did not generate any controversy. I was so wrong.

The next day I read of the Ashish Nandy controversy in the papers. I had completely missed it but I could not stop smiling. JLF and controversy go hand in hand now—last time, it was Rushdie (in absentia) and this time, Nandy.

Tales from Timbuktu

2013-02-05T11:30:00.001+08:00

For most of us, Timbuktu has been a noun and an adjective—a shorthand for a far off place. I also knew of Timbuktu as the title of a Paul Auster novel. Over the decades, Timbuktu has come to acquire the same kind of mystic aura that is reserved for places like Casablanca, thanks to the classic Hollywood love story. What has happened in the case of places like Casablanca and Timbuktu is that cinema and literature have turned a real place into a mythical landscape

Yet, in the last few days, Timbuktu has been hogging the limelight for all the wrong reasons—the desert town had been captured by Tuareg nationalist rebels and Islamic extremists and the French army had to intervene to flush them out.

In the process, it was reported that something very precious was lost—a treasure trove of ancient Greek and Islamic texts. The rebels had torched a library (The Ahmed Baba Institute) that was the repository of these ancient texts. They also destroyed some sufi shrines, “claiming such shrines were forbidden” in their version of intolerant Islam.

The loss was mourned internationally and it was on the news everywhere. The rebels, who were adamant on imposing shariah laws, were condemned.

You can’t miss two ironies here. One, Islamic extremists setting fire to texts that were part of their own heritage. They were not the infidel Mongols who had raided and destroyed the ancient libraries in Baghdad in 1258. During the siege of Baghdad, many books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy were destroyed. The siege marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age.

Two, the saviours in Timbuktu were the French. In 1789, when Napoleon entered Cairo and “vigorously appeased conservative Muslim clerics in the hope they might form the bulwark of pro-French forces in the country,” there were many revolts against his occupation. “Many other Muslims saw plainly the subjugation of Egypt by a Christian from the West as a catastrophe;” writes Pankaj Mishra in his brilliant book, From the Ruins of the Empire, “and they were vindicated when French soldiers, while suppressing the facts against their occupation, stormed the al-Azhar mosque, tethered their horses to the prayer niches, trampled the Korans under their boots, drank wine until they were helpless and then urinated on the floor.”

One can argue what Napolean’s army did was more an act of bravado, showing how they could morally subjugate an occupied people and disrespect their culture; something quite different from an act of pure philistinism as was demonstrated by the fleeing extremists in Timbuktu.

How do we square these ironies? Let’s put it this way: time heals everything, people are ennobled by forces of civilisation and there is redemption in God’s kingdom.

Now, let us come back to the present.

While peace has returned to Timbuktu, new stories about the burning of manuscripts are coming out into the public. I read in today’s newspaper that all has not been lost.

According to a report in the IHT, the imam of a mosque in Timbuktu was able to save 8,000 volumes of ancient manuscripts by moving them into a bunker in an undisclosed location—that was before the attack. “These manuscripts, they are not just for us in Timbuktu,” said Ali Imam Ben Essayouti. “They belong to all of humanity. It is our duty to save them.”

And that’s the point I want to make here: it is our duty to save them. So what can be done?

While the act of this saviour Imam is laudable, something more needs to be done by the international community, and organisations like UNESCO and Google can really help in this matter.

Given the kind of turmoil the Middle East and Africa are going through, won’t it be wise to get all ancient manuscripts scanned and digitally saved? UNESCO knows where all these treasure troves are. Google already has a global book scanning project on. If we do this, we need not fear the extremists torching ancient libraries anywhere in the world anymore. Not that we want it to happen, but better safe than sorry.

Implications of an Indian Gang-rape

2013-01-16T09:15:00.001+08:00

My opinion piece in the Asia Sentinel today:

The moment I heard that the Delhi gang-rape victim was being flown into Singapore, I knew what was going on. That unfortunate woman, whom we will call Amanat, was the victim of a horrible gang rape and mutilation at the hands of a bunch of hoodlums in Delhi. She was clinging to her life. Doctors had removed parts of her intestines at Safdarjung Medical Hospital and she was surviving on life support. It was difficult to imagine that she would be able to live.

As has been reported across the world, generating spreading outrage, the victim, a paramedical student, was brutally raped and assaulted in a moving bus in Delhi on the night of Dec 16. Moving her to Singapore was clearly a political decision. If she had died in Delhi, the public outrage, which was already bursting out of control (a constable, Subhash Tomar, had died during the violent demonstrations at India Gate in Delhi), would get even more fierce. News of her death coming from Singapore would be much more manageable for the establishment. This is exactly what happened.

Right after the news of the victim being moved to Singapore flashed across TV channels, I tweeted about the same from my Twitter account. So far, I had avoided saying anything about the girl or the tragedy that had rightly incensed Indians across the world; not that my saying anything on this issue mattered-I am hardly Sonia or Rahul Gandhi.

My response was mute because for years I had been reading about crimes against women in India, including rape, mutilation, murder and communal humiliation (being paraded naked on the streets or in villages by men). In 1994, Shekhar Kapur had made a stunning film on this subject-Bandit Queen. The film was based on the life of Phoolan Devi, a poor girl who turns into a dreaded dacoit after high-caste men in her village gang-rape her.

Over the years, I have read too many reports to count of girls being kidnapped and raped in Delhi and the national capital region (NCR), including many of such crimes being committed on buses (I personally dreaded living in Delhi for the lack of safety and also worried about my family members when they were out on the streets). Every time I read such hideous stories, I would be filled with anger and revulsion. And it was not just Delhi where such crimes were rampant. It had been happening all over the country.

Read the full story here at Asia Sentinel.

Why I wrote The Singapore Decalogue?

2012-12-26T14:33:00.000+08:00

My first collection of short stories, The Singapore Decalogue: Episodes in the Life of a Foreign Talent (Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2012) was released in November this year at the Singapore Writers Festival. The book was supported by the National Arts Council Singapore under the Arts Creation Fund grant.

In this collection of short stories, I have tried to create vignettes of life in Singapore. This is my tribute to this city state, which has built its social capital with great wisdom, civic sense, and quotidian practicality.

Like many modern metros, the Lion City is compact, with people of various ethnicity and nationalities living side by side. Though they live mostly secluded, private lives, there are times when their paths cross. This civic commingling of people can be harmonious or chaotic, depending on the circumstances.

In these stories, I have tried to portray the hopes and frustrations of a few interconnected characters (that was truer for the earlier draft when the characters were varied). The bustling metropolis attracts all kinds of people who want to make a life here. What happens to their dreams? What kind of struggles do they go through? Do they feel alienated? What do they love about the city? And so on.

Through the panoply of characters, mainly built around a main character, Asif Basheer, an aspiring poet from India, I have woven together a web of stories that throw light on various contemporary themes. The initial aspiration, following in the footsteps of Tolstoy and the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (especially his film cycle, The Decalogue), was to explore themes based on the Ten Commandments, but I finally transformed the idea. I was anxious, even afraid, that the stories might come across as too moralistic or formulaic if I went down that route. Nevertheless, my moral concerns about making choices in life still shaped and informed the stories in The Singapore Decalogue.

As I have said elsewhere, more than a writer I am an inspired reader. In terms of actual inspiration behind the stories in this collection, there were many influences—both from life that I have seen from close quarters and from books that I have read over the years. So, in these stories, besides expressing my appreciation of the city and its people, I have also tried to pay my debt to many of my favourite writers and their works that I have benefitted from. The first story, that introduces the main character, is my homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky. In fact, the story begins in the same way as the master’s novel, Crime and Punishment. His protagonist, Raskolnikov, a conflicted and aspiring intellectual, finds a modern day reflection in my main character, Asif Basheer. As the stories unfold, we become privy to Asif’s trials and tribulations and see life in Singapore through his life’s prism. We meet characters who interact with Asif or come into his life. In the earlier version, Asif’s story culminates in a bizarre incident in Boat Quay—Singapore’s commercial heart but that has changed in the final version.

In the original version, the last story summed up the aspects of Asif’s life in epistolary form and it was meant to be my tribute to Gustave Flaubert who wrote some of the most beautiful and passionate letters that I have ever read. In my view, this completed an arch—the first story and the last—as both Dostoevsky and Flaubert were contemporaries in 19^th century Europe, and died one year apart (1880 and 1881 respectively). This was how I had tried to connect the past with the present. No matter how times change, people and their hopes and sufferings remain the same. Besides these two great writers, there are stories in the collection that are inspired by the styles of my other favourite writers—James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Hanif Kureishi. Initially, my model was Joyce’s Dubliners in which he tried a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. A lot changed from the initial idea but that was what I had in my first draft.

A note of explanation here: by dropping big names (Joyce, Hemingway, et al.) I don’t claim any greatness for myself (how could I?). That would be preposterous and arrogant of me (some have already charged me of being a snob because I don’t like most of the books that are being published today, especially fiction—so I don’t want to aggravate matters here). I am doing that because I want to acknowledge my debt and put on record that I drew inspiration from their works, and that I feel a sense of kinship with them (as many reader would feel towards their favorite writers).

The first draft of The Singapore Decalogue was ready in 2011 and as I started working on the book with my publisher and my editor, the contours of the collection began to change. The publishers had liked the opening story, Crime and Punishment, so much that they wanted to have Asif Basheer, the main protagonist, as the lead in each story. That was not my plan. This meant that I had to drop almost half the stories from the collection and write new ones. I needed some time to do that. By that time, I was also working on my non-fiction book, The Resurgence of Satyam, and had started work on a screenplay. So, there was a hiatus between the first batch of stories that I wrote in 2010-2011 and the later stories that went into the collection. They were written after July 2012.

I still like some of the stories that were dropped from the first draft. Who knows? They might go into The Singapore Decalogue 2.

Copies of The Singapore Decalogue are available at Kinokuniya, Singapore for purchasing and at all branches of National Library Singapore (NLB) for borrowing.

Tokyo Not Cancelled

2012-12-21T15:41:00.000+08:00

We (I was accompanied by my wife) reached Tokyo in the afternoon of November 24. We were very tired as we had to leave house around 3am to catch the 6am Delta flight. Not only we were tired, we were very hungry too. We had a quick sandwich at Starbucks before we boarded the flight. I could hardly sleep on the plane as I am always tempted to watch movies on a flight and I always have a backlog of movies that I wish to watch.

Just two days before the flight to Tokyo I had watched almost an hour of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel en route to Bangkok and had loved it completely (especially the humour in the film). So, during the flight to Tokyo, I first watched that movie (from where I had left it off) and I don't regret it. Perhaps it was the best film of this year for me. Many Indians, including myself, dislike India for its crowd, squalor and poverty, and the film sort of showed me how to see the same situation in a different light ("In India, life is not a right," says one character. "It's a privilege."). That is the beauty of the film.If you haven't watched it, you must. There is a lot of good humour in the film. I thought it was a well-written movie.

Coming from Singapore, almost any airport in the world will disappoint me--in terms of ease of movement, layout and sheer opulence. Narita was no different. Anyway, the immigration process was very smooth and after collecting our bags, we boarded the Narita Express (NEX) to our hotel in Shinjuku.

Shinjuku is one of those little districts in Tokyo where high life and low life come together in a confluence. Our hotel was a short walk away from the station (the world's busiest railway junction, says the guide book). After checking into our hotel, we rested for a while in the room--even for a four-star hotel, the room was very small: a double bed, a desk, and one chair. There wasn't any cupboard in the room. And there was a narrow space between the bed and the wall, narrow enough to put a suitcase down. Freshly pressed robes waited for us. There was TV which had only Japanese channels on it: I found one channel where a man was furiously talking about some products. The shower room was even smaller but the snazzy toilet seat more than compensated for it. It had some amazing functions and I wonder why hasn’t the world (or, at least Singapore) adopted technologically advanced Japanese toilets? Think of it: today we carry so much advanced smartphones but when it comes to toilets, we have not evolved much. It is a shame.

After a while, we hit the streets. It was evening and it was very cold, and we admired our cleverness that we had packed enough winter clothing to brave the Tokyo weather. The streets around Shinjuku had a quaintness to them—small, narrow streets, with small, little shops and lots of neon signs and locals, mostly youngsters, pounding them in groups. My wife thought we were back in the 70s. Despite the cold, it seemed there was enough cheerfulness in the atmosphere and it didn't seem like a country that had been stuck in economic stagnation for decades now. The traffic was slow and there didn't seem to be a mad rush for anything (or was it because it was a Saturday?), and many people rode bicycles on the streets. Even the taxis looked of an old vintage but they were all in good condition. The whole atmosphere reminded me of a Dev Anand film shot in the 1970s or 80s. My wife was right about the feel of the district.

Next to our hotel and across the street there were plenty of vending machines. That's where I first saw vending machines that dispensed cigarettes. Also, every now and then, one would find a Family Mart or a Seven Eleven store to buy items of daily and frequent use, including food items, water and fat, comic magazines that were sealed to prevent thumbing by browsing-happy readers.

The streets were packed with noodle bars and restaurants (the signs were sometimes vertically displayed, implying different restaurants at different levels of a building) and global fast food restaurants like McDonald's and KFC were easy to find. We also spotted a Yoshinoya outlet but it looked so different from what I had seen in Singapore that I decided not to enter it. There didn't even seem to be a menu at the counter.

Across the Shinjuku station, there was Takashimaya, the shopping complex of the same-name that we have on Orchard Road in Singapore. That's where we planned to spend the evening. On the way to the mall, we came across beautiful Christmas decorations. We saw people taking pictures around the decorations.

Even though the mall was sprawling, the layout of the stores seemed to be a bit confusing or maybe it needed many more trips to get used to it and find our way around with ease. We had spent nearly half an hour inside the mall and as we entered an elevator to go to the fifth floor, we had a taste of the famous Japanese earthquake. The elevator shook, the lights sputtered off and the doors forestalled. Luckily, we were not between two floors so all of us rushed out of the lift.

The mall's staff sprung into action: all elevators and escalators were jammed up, and they showed the shoppers the exits. I wanted to see Kinokuniya the bookstore but my wife didn't want to hang around anymore so we followed a bunch of locals who took the staircase down. Somehow we managed to get out of the building. Outside, people were milling round on the streets as if nothing had happened. We went to a Starbucks which was very crowded, (and it seems young people in Tokyo love hanging out in Starbucks) and ordered a cappuccino. We collected our drink and sat outside and as we began to sip it, we realized we had been given the wrong drink. But the cinnamon-flavoured tea tasted nice in the cold and we carried on, dropping any idea to complain to the café’s staff.

We had our dinner at McDonald's--we got some burgers and we had to ask for ketchup. It was really self-service in there as we had to clear the table after we had eaten--everyone was doing that in the restaurant. Japanese shops seemed to get along fine with minimal staff and we saw it everywhere. They could hardly speak English but communication was not a problem. Gestures and pictures supplemented pidgin English.

I slept at night wishing for our safety. There weren’t any more tremors that night.

The next morning we set for Odaiba, a reclaimed island next to the Tokyo Bay. The train ride across the Rainbow Bridge offered amazing vistas. We had to change three lines but the train rides were comfortable and the trains ran on time, exactly as I was told. Tokyo has one of the best metro systems in the world. They have about 16 lines in operation.

We entered one of the shopping malls in Odaiba and by the time we were done with our shopping it was dark outside. We had our lunch inside the mall--we ate the delicious beef bowls at Yoshinoya, and I put a check on my list.

After coming back to our hotel room, we went out again. I had to see the original Kinokuniya in Tokyo and finally after asking a couple of helpful Japanese staff at Takashimaya, I was able to step inside the 6 story building that housed Kinokuniya. The annex (building) was old and the elevator didn't work. It was ten minutes before closing time and we had to use the escalators. I finally managed to reach the English language section of the bookstore which was on the 6th storey. Just for fun I asked them if they my books. They didn't have them. I bought a novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, for the sake of memory, and they kindly draped my copy with a cover. Nice gesture!

That night we had our dinner at KFC and the portions (true for both the pieces of chicken and fries) were really small. But the taste was fine.

The next morning we left Tokyo for the United States. The journey from the hotel to the Narita airport turned into our biggest adventure in Japan, and what was meant to be a 90 minutes journey turned into a 3 hour long rush. That is something I have to tell you when we meet (remember to ask me), and not write about it here.

I bankrupted myself while writing Maximum City: Suketu Mehta

2012-12-18T11:44:00.001+08:00

New York-based writer Suketu Mehta is one of my favourite writers. I became a fan of his writing (he also loves Hemingway and Naipaul like I do) when I read his autobiographical account of his experiences in Mumbai (where he was born and partly raised before his diamond trading merchant family moved to New York), Maximum City. The book was published in 2004 and I read it shortly after I moved to Singapore. I loved the book because it was not a chore to read; it was like watching a Bombay film. Why was it an easy read? Mehta explains in an interview:

"... the impression readers have that Maximum City is a quick read is a false one because it was certainly not a quick write. But it takes a lot—Hemingway taught me this—to make writing seem effortless. It took me a long time before I learned how to write simply. My early sentences back in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were long. As Indians we tend to like longer sentences."

Unlike many contemporary writers who are in a hurry to churn book after book, Suketu is a patient writer. He took seven years to research and write Maximum City. What I did not know though is that he had bankrupted himself while doing this book. This happened to him even though he had an advance from the publishers. In this interview with NDTV (Power of One), he reveals that he incurred a considerable amount of debt by the time he was done with the book. "When I finished my book, I was 40,000 dollars in debt," he tells NDTV's Srinivasan Jain.

How many writers will take this kind of risk?

In an interview with Karan Mahajan, Mehta revealed his method of working in Mumbai: he would hang out with his book's characters until 3 am and would write down everything between 3am and 6am:

"I wrote as I reported [in Bombay]. So I would meet, say, a gangster, I’d go hang out with him, then I’d go to the beer bars and meet Mona Lisa [an alias for the bar girl in Maximum City], and then I’d come back home at 3 a.m. From 3 to 6 a.m. I would just write. It was the easiest writing I ever did. It was all in my head and I needed to get it out in real time. So I wrote these long sections—it was great. I was on speed or something, not literally. Better than speed"

In the same interview, Mehta says he also loves to cook his own meals and loves to take an afternoon nap--very much my kind of guy (but I can't have naps; I am in office in the afternoons).

Suketu currently lives in a Manhattan apartment and teaches journalsim (narrative nonfiction) at New York University. In the NDTV interview, he says that he has been working on a book about the New York City immigrant experience. The current reality is that every two in three New Yorkers are immigrants, he says, and he wants to tell the story of the city from that point of view.

India books a big mistake

Mehta is skeptical about the recent crop of India books--big books that try to define the phenomenon of a changing India within a few hundred pages. "All big books that have recently come out about India are a big mistake," he says. Why? Because it is insane to try to capture such a vast country within a book. However, he says Aakash Kapur has done a relatively better job in India Becoming where he follows a set of characters.

Mehta is also an admirer of Katherine Boo's book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. "I was filled with envy when I read Kat Boo's book," he says. "She has done exactly the right thing with the book ... and I am amazed that she could do it without (understanding) the language".

Mehta then talks about Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, an American journalist who writes on the marginalized members of society (adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, women in prison) and mentions her seminal book, Random Family (2003). "Her book was inspiration for our books," he says, "mine and Kate Boo's."

When Jain asks him if he likes any nonfiction books done in India, he mentions Following Fish by Samant Subramaniam.

How 9/11 changed writing

At one point of the interview, Mehta says that "more students now want to do narrative nonfiction than fiction" in the context of his journalism classes."9/11 had a lot to do with it," he says. "After 9/11 we realised what kind of fictional image could be created that could compete with this image of two giant airliners
slamming into two giant towers and the whole world changing as a result." Fact had become stranger than fiction and fiction could not compete with it--or was confused to deal with it for a while.

However, he says that now, some American novels are dealing with the 9/11 tragedy. He mentions Netherland by Joseph O'Neil as a good example.

On Social Media

Mehta is on Twitter but he rarely tweets. "I have only tweeted 7 times," he claims. Even though there are very few writers on twitter (Salman Rushdie is there), some have made good use of it. "Teju Cole has taken the form and made it literary," says Mehta about the writer of Open City. He likens the twitter form to the form of Haiku.

Mehta is not worried about the future of books or writing. "Storytelling is a basic human need," he says. "It will always be there, only the forms of delivery will change." How reassuring!

Fellow New Yorker Salman Rushdie is a friend and Mehta says he likes his memoir, Joseph Anton, and he is aware that some have not liked it and some complain of his artistic decline after the fatwa was imposed on him. Mehta has a very simple explanation for all the Salman-bashing: "People hate Salman because he gets a lot of chicks around him."

Apart from the New York book, Mehta is also working on a new translation of Gandhi's autobiography. This is what he told Karan Mahajan in an earlier interview:

"Once, I was telling my father how I think The Story of My Experiments with Truth is really not well written, how it’s long-winded, even if the material is certainly fascinating. My father said, “But it’s really beautifully written. It’s really elegant and concise.” I said, “We’re not talking about the same book.” He said, “Which one are you talking about? I’m talking about the original, in Gujarati.” Then we compared the Aatmakatha with the English version. This book was written in the salad days of the century and it was translated by two of his political secretaries—Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal—who were very good political secretaries but not necessarily good writers in English. Gandhiji did look over the translation and corrected it, but, you know, he had a few other things on his mind, like leading a country to independence!"

More power to your pen Mr. Mehta and may you get to take a lot of afternoon naps!

V S Naipaul and Indian Muslims

2012-11-03T13:05:00.000+08:00

V S Naipaul and controversy go hand in hand.The master was recently speaking at Tata Literature Live! festival in Mumbai where he was being honoured with Lifetime Achievement Award. Naipaul had said something like "Muslims destroyed India" during his talk and it ruffled many feathers. In reaction, playwright Girish Karnad, speaking at the festival on Friday, "took the audience aback with his unexpected criticism of V.S. Naipaul for his “rabid antipathy towards Indian Muslims”, and asked for an explanation from the festival’s organizers on why they had honoured the author with the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award."

When I saw these headlines in the media and read Karnard's arguments (Girish Karnad takes on V.S. Naipaul), I was reminded of my own essay "A Convert's Complaint: Analyzing Naipaul’s Views on Islam" that I had written probably ten years ago when Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I am pasting it here for reference in case some people want to take a look at it. It was first published in Akhbar, a Delhi journal.

A Convert’s Complaint

Analyzing Naipaul’s Views on Islam

By Zafar H Anjum

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s views on Islam have come into sharp focus after he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001. In the context of the September 11 (Black Tuesday) attacks and the subsequent bombing of Afghanistan by America, his much-quoted and debated views on Islam and the Islamic world have gained immediate significance. However, his views on Islam have been very much in the circulation (in the media) ever since he wrote Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998). In this essay, I am not denying Sir Vidia what is his rightful due: the Nobel belonged to Naipaul as much as he belonged to the Nobel. There is no doubt about that. Naipaul is one of the greatest living writers in English today. In this essay, I intend to analyze Sir Naipaul’s famous remarks on Islam.

Naipaul claims that Islam asks its followers to abandon their past histories, culture, and identities. His quotes on Islam, among others, have appeared in different magazines after he won the grand prize, and here I quote him from different sources. Naipaul has been quoted to be saying, “Islam has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it does not matter’….”

Elsewhere, Naipaul is known to have said, “Islam is in its origin an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands. His sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own: he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his.”

Reading such views on Islam, two basic questions arise in my mind. What’s new about these Naipaulian claims? Before Naipaul, there have been many commentators who have expressed their unfavorable views on Islam. And secondly, are his accusations true for Islam only?

It seems Naipaul has been making sweeping generalizations apropos his views on Islam. He is used to doing that (As we know, he has also “arisen much controversy because of his politically incorrect views of the ‘half-made societies’”). One may well ask how can one say something like this about Sir Vidia. For this, and, before we go into analyzing the merits of his views, we must know how Naipaul formulates his opinions. I think knowing that is important as the act (of forming an opinion) is the result of a process (of accumulating details, of gathering information from various sources). No one takes the credit from Naipaul that he is a meticulous observer (his self-admitted role as a writer "to look and to look again, to re-look and rethink."); however, he has his own ways of making observations, which may not be agreeable to everybody. Let’s see an example.

Charudatta Deshpande who used to work with The Indian Post had the chance to spend a week in close contact with Naipaul in Bombay when he came to collect material for his book, India: A Million Mutinies, in the 80s. He writes in Gentleman (May 1989) recollecting the experience (after Naipaul has spent three hours interviewing Namdeo Dhasal):

After the interview, Naipaul thanked both Namdeo and Mallika profusely.

“On our way back to the hotel, I was surprised to hear him comment: “Very superficial people, without depth. Don’t you think so?

“I don’t agree with you. We met only thrice and that too, formally. I don’t want to refute your observation but I feel because of the language and cultural differences, they may not have expressed themselves fully in the interview.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think they had much more to offer than what they have already given us,” said Naipaul.

Clearly, Naipaul is not known to entertain views other than his own. From the above quoted interaction, one could imagine the personal liberties taken by Sir Vidia while formulating his opinions about people and culture. I find his style dangerous and unbalanced. [Excuse me for digressing here: I have similar feelings about his views on E. M. Forster. How does it matter if Forster was a homosexual? If a writer’s moral uprightness is so central to his standards of judgment, then why is Naipaul so oblivious to his own shortcomings? Paul Theroux has a lot to say about him on this score.]

Naipaul posits that Islam asks the converts to deny their ancestral culture. How can it happen? To any educated Muslim, there is no doubt about the historical veracity that he has studied in the textbooks. In that sense, say for an Indian Muslim, Asoka and Budhha and Shivaji and Babar are part of his heritage. If you ask an educated Indian Muslim, he would not be dismissive about his heritage. He would find, as I found out, his heritage—Islamic or un-Islamic—rather ennobling—a source of mixed baggage to learn from, to make this life worth living.

Naipaul says, “Islam is in its origin an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands.” It is true that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was revealed in Arab. The seed of this faith, like any other faith, traveled to different parts of the world from that epicentre. However, it is a misnomer to label it as an Arab religion. This term gives the impression that it (Islam) was meant only for the Arabs. A Priori, it may also imply that those non-Arabs who converted to this faith were somehow illegitimate or inferior in doing so. However, it was Islam, which preached the message that no one—Arab, non-Arab, white, black, tall, short—is superior or inferior to any one else, except in terms of piety. Naipaul’s second assertion is historically unsound. The fact is, even the first generation Muslims who became Muslims on the call of prophet Mohammad were converts—converts from their pagan faiths. Not even the prophet was a born Muslim. After he got enlightenment, only then did he become the messenger of God. Taking the logic further, can we ask if we can call the Europeans converted Christians or the American Jews as converts?

Naipaul says, “a convert’s worldview alters.” Really? I don’t think so. If I’m a convert, how does it affect my worldview for it is as good or as bad as any of my non-convert (read Hindu!!) fellow Indian? Therefore, I fail to understand how my worldview is going to be affected by the fact that I am a convert or not. However, my logic says that one’s education (plus the quality of education) can definitely affect one’s worldview. Then what is Naipaul hinting here? Is he identifying Islam as a faith with an automatic and in-built ignorance (towards the outside world) that it infuses in is followers?

Naipaul says that his (a convert’s) holy places are in Arab lands.

True (and what’s wrong with that?). But also sacred are the local neighborhood mosques, the dargahs, and the famous mausoleums of the innumerable saints. For example, for the Indian Muslims, the dargah of Khwaja Gharib Nawaz is so sacred. Similarly, if one can ask Naipaul what’s wrong if the Jews and the Christians have their holy places in the Arab land?

Naipaul says that his (a convert’s) sacred language is Arabic.

True. But what’s wrong with that? It does not take away, for example, the convert’s love for one’s mother tongue (Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, etc.)! Now for decades in India and Pakistan, we have been reading the Holy Quran in Urdu and English to understand its meaning. Mustafa Kemal Pasha allowed prayers be said in Turkish instead of Arabic. Things change and people adapt things to their convenience. (Must I add here that the Jewish language is sacred to the Jews and I see no problems with that? Does Naipaul need to be reminded that once the Bible was supposed to be sacrosanct in Greek only? Has he forgotten what commotion it created when it was first translated into German?)

Naipaul says, “Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands.”

True. But also true is that fact that this is the case with almost all the religions. The only thing or distinction about Islam is that it is the most recent religion, and hence the most strident. It came to the world through Prophet Mohammad only some 1400 years ago, and hence it is the Islamic countries/societies in the world, which are experiencing tumultuous conditions of historical change. Some of the Islamic countries are as new as 30 years (Bangladesh). Societies take time to settle down peacefully with their past in the face of a changed present.

Naipaul asks why this tumult only in the Islamic societies? It is because of Islam’s historical recency that we come across tumultuous situations in the Islamic societies.

Let’s go a little deeper.

The fact is very simple. Any new idea or religion, which enters a society, seeks rejection of the old. Rather, the acceptance of this new idea is based on the premise that the old is not reasonable any more, and hence it’s abandonment, and the embracing of the new faith. What’s discarded in the process is what had become old, trite, and useless—a part of the process of cultural/ideological evolution. What is left behind is what is historically moribund. History is witness to this process. For instance, when Christianity came to Europe, did it not replace the pagan faiths in the continent? People accepted Christianity because they found it more acceptable than what they previously believed in. So, what was wrong with Christianity? Similarly when the Aryans came to India with a new faith and lifestyle, did they not change or affect the cultural and ideological space of those who had been living here. That is the process of historical evolution. It is irrational to think that this will not happen in societies.

We all know that the communal divide that we see in India is the construct of the British colonials. First they captured power in different Indian states with the help of Muslims. After the 1857 revolt, they lost their trust in their Muslim collaborators. Then they thought of promoting the Hindus as their new allies. This is how the policy of divide and rule started in India. We all know this. The British sowed the seeds of this “Hindu Muslim divide” canard not only to strengthen their hold on India but also to justify their imperialistic policies to their own people. Let me quote from a conversation between two working class British citizens, Tom and Jim, in London from Sajjad Zaheer’s novel London Ki Ek Raat (1938) [Like Naipaul, Zaheer studied in England]. The setting is a pub where both of them are having drinks:

“Tom!” Jim said slowly. “If we leave India what’ll happen to that country? We read in the newspapers that there the Hindus and Muslims are the followers of two different religions and they always fight with each other. They are each other’s sworn enemies. If we don’t maintain peace in India and get out of that country, there is the danger of a bloody civil strife there.”

This dialogue clearly shows how the British systematically developed and disseminated this “Hind-Muslim divide” lie that the common man in England believed it to be an original characteristic of India (and not a British construct of power which it actually was).

If we look into Naipaul’s writings, we find that he first dug up his Hindu past. Then he declared that the Muslim invaders were responsible for destroying all that was good and great in India. I admire Naipaul’s sincerity of exploration and investigation, but where he fails, which he himself does not realize, is his falling into the trap of political history as Hindu history and Muslim history. This was how the colonial historiographers had started to give a communal interpretation to history. The fact is history is not about the religions of the historical cast. It is about the victors (stronger people or ideas) and the vanquished (weaker people or ideas). Seen from this viewpoint, one finds Naipaul a victim of the colonial mindset. No wonder he studied in England, and he still wears a hat.

Today Islam is the only religion, which is as big as the Christian faith. It is the only challenger to Christianity. What the West fears is the takeover of Christianity by Islam. In the Western world, the number of Non-Muslims converting to Islam is hopping. The West was smug when it converted people in the poor countries in Asia and Africa. Now it is alarmed when the East is taking away their own people (Americans, Europeans) into their folds.

What the British construct of “divide and rule” did to India in the colonial times, Samuel Huntington has done it to the world in the post cold war scenario. (More examples: The Nazis vs. the Non-Aryans; the Communists vs. the people with a God!). After September the 11th the Huntington era (The West vs. Islam) has begun. And in such times, perhaps no author is more relevant than Naipaul, and perhaps that’s why he has been bestowed with the Nobel Prize.

Summing up, I’d like to sign off with the comments from my friend, Yousuf Saeed, a Delhi-based filmmaker and journalist, who had the following to share on this subject. It is an Indian Muslim’s complaint to the legend we know as V. S. Naipaul:

“Naipaul claims that people who accepted Islam wrote off their pre-Islamic past. This must be true for countries like Egypt, Turkey, Tunis, Malaysia, and Iran, which Naipaul traveled in, and wrote about. But unfortunately, the country he forgot to travel to is his own India. He grossly underestimates the past and present of Muslims in India, which has the world’s second largest Muslim population, and would, in many ways, present an antithesis to his theories. Notwithstanding the current trends of the ‘Wahabization’ of Islam here, a large number of Indian Muslims, especially in small towns and villages, still carry a lot of their pre-Islamic cultural past. To begin with, one could simply visit either the local dargah (mausoleum) of a Muslim saint, or the observance of Muharram by typical Shia communities, and see for oneself the traditions, rituals, and iconography that has been carried over from the Hindu past. It is possible (and there are historical evidences of it) that similar multicultural scenarios may have existed in other Muslim countries prior to the recent trend of purification of Islam. And one needs to investigate this issue entirely before coming up with such generalization.”

What do you say Mr. Naipaul?

In memory of Jaspal Bhatti Saheb

2012-10-25T11:54:00.001+08:00

This morning when I reached my office and checked the news, I was shocked to learn that comedian Jaspal Bhatti had died in a car accident. He was in Punjab promoting his forthcoming film, Power Cut!

Imagine promoting a movie called 'Power Cut' and suddenly your lifeline is cut by the almighty. What can one do? R.I.P Mr. Bhatti!

Bhatti Saheb showed his talent in Flop Show, a TV series that used to be broadcast on Doordarshan decades ago (actually, 1989). As a school-going kid, I used to love the show--comedy used to be in short supply in those days (there was no YouTube then).

To remember this great comic talent, who did not get his due in Bollywood, I am sharing with you this little comic piece that I wrote a few days ago on a whim. This is my tribute to Bhatti Saheb, my way of remembering him as he wanted us to laugh at ourselves.

This is the chapter 1 of I Break The Leg of Inglis, a book that I began to write a few days ago. The idea came to me on the bus on my way home. Let me know if it tickles your funny bones.

I Break the Leg of Englis

Hello! So please to meet you. I take the honour of shaking your hand. My name is Parvesh Sharma. I am a Bihari and I am here to break the leg of Englis.

Breaking the leg of Englis has been my lifelong dream. When I was a little boy in a little village called Angsola, I broke my own leg climbing a stool. I was reaching out to steal the rasgullas from the peak of the almirah. I was doing something wrong. God punish me badly. I become a little langda, but I become god-fearing from that time. Every mishappen has a lesson on it and that is why it is called a sting in the tale.

If you don’t fully understand me, I bend my behind in forgiveness and fully seek your support. We starting a new bank branch of Englis called Binglis. If there can be Hinglis, why not Binglis? If you don’t allow this facility, where is justice, haan?

Any way, when my father see my broken leg, he scold me black and blue. ‘If you have to break anything, break the leg of Englis,’ he shout. At that time I think Englis is name of some mild animal. So I remember what my father tell me that day and I tie it in the fold of my antenna.

Before I tell you more of me, I tell you the behind of my family. I belong to a long tradition of family history full of writers. My grandfather write letters for other people in deep trouble of not able to write a word. He write their happiness, he write their sadness, and he make money like that. He make money but my grandmother still not happy with him because he give lot of money to Congress and Gandhiji.

My father also a writer; he write big big words on walls and on big tin signs—the village people call him PhD master. He no PhD from some big university. He not even high school pass. But people call him that surname because he can talk Englis like a convent pass Angrej. My village very proud of my father.

When I born, my father tell the whole village: ‘My boy when grow up, he become even better than me. He break the leg of Englis in his own surf.’

What he mean is I talk and walk like an Angrej from England. And become a writer.

So, every time I do mistake my father remind me of his promise to his village people. ‘Don’t make keema of my ijjat,’ he tell me. ‘Break the leg of Englis.’

So, that became my possession—breaking the leg of Englis.

When I in primary school, my father give me Father Kamil Bilke dictionary. Every day I remember ten words. He become very happy and give me round round sweets to eat.

After primary, he send me for tuition to an Englis teacher for grammar. He very strict man. He talk with a ruler and hit your head if you make a wrong mistake. But he a man of bad habit. When he talk, he take out his tongue too outside his mouth like a snake. The spit from his mouth also fly out of his mouth and make us dirty. In few days I loss my appetite for grammar.

I never recover the loss till today. My guru Ketan Bagat says never mind. ‘You think all writers write books with perfect grammar?’ he tell me one day. ‘Beta, you can become a writer even with bad grammar.’ ‘How? I ask. ‘There are people in publishing house, mostly ladies, called editors,’ he say. ‘They clean copy like you clean a tea pot or a gwala cleans his cowshed.’

I turant understood what he mean. ‘You mean the press house like white house,’ I say. ‘Writers come, take shit and go out. The editors clean the shit and get money for their job.’

‘Correct,’ say my guru.

I touch his feet and say, ‘They are noble people. They clean dirt of others. God bless them.’

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