On the time of the Strandbeest

I attended a series of brilliant lectures today loosely corralled under the theme "Mediated Life". Of these, I want to talk briefly about Helmut Muller-Sievers' all too brief account of the nineteenth century and its relationship with forced motion; specifically the politics of the cylinder and those of the screw in relation to the limits and indeed the malleability and adaptability of the human body. And all of these in relation to virtuosity. And I won't say any more. If any of you need further elaboration, ask me.

However, this post is not about his lecture as much as the ways in which it reminded me of something I had espied in The New Yorker, Ian Frazier's article "The March of the Strandbeests". And whether this might help us think of machines, men, materiality, the body, cyborgs, and indeed, art in the twenty first century.

On the precocity and precariousness of that elusive being we call love

Let's make one thing very clear. We don't do Valentine's. That would be horribly uncool. But we are not entirely cynical either. So in the interest of a critical, yet marginally hopeful view that can go beyond the intensely heterosexual, heteronormative annoyance of Hallmark madness, here is a pre-Valentine post on the nature of the only grand narrative we have left in the world.

Love.

And this is the one time of the year when I feel like rejecting it in its every form. Just because the stores, the streets, the movies, the candies, all plot in unison to cajole me otherwise. (Yes, the plot is neoliberal capitalism. Yes I know).

But if I end up calling this grand narrative corrupt, and false, and superficial, and all those other critiques, then surely I must know what the real deal is? And this is the problem. I really don't. So when I claim that some forms of blatantly marketed coercive love make no sense, what I am really saying is that I prefer some forms of love-marketing over others.

So before you lose all patience, all I'm saying is this:

Love is mediated.

Image © Paul James Gomes

(The above is an excerpt from my friend Paul's super interesting work on the contemporary Bangladeshi film industry)

And yes, perhaps there are forms of love in the world that are less mediated than others. Babies and puppies. But I do not have the capacity or the patience to go biological right now. So bear with me. Love is mediated. And no, this is not a bad thing. Humans are mediated beings. We learn how to eat, sit, talk, listen, fear, shout, lean, lose, attach, let go, and hang on. We would be nothing without mediation. We adhere to form. In the loosest sense of the word. Even as we produce form. And this gives us the capacity to a narrative, and a stance, and a sense of being in the world. We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (Apologies to Geertz, but well, this could be the new definition for native ethnography). And stories need plots. And we cannot lose the plot.

So in random order, here are three important bits of mediation that structure my narrative. Things, and songs, and movies, and books that I am attached to because they tried telling me how and what to love. Some of these I have thankfully escaped, others lurk in the background.

(a) First on the list, my teenage embarrassments. Triumphalist, young love against all odds. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "QSQT" and "MPK".

QSQT or Qayamat se Qayamat Tak was made in 1988. The word qayamat can be translated in various ways so I am going to call this "From Resurrection to Catastrophe", love being resurrection and society being catastrophic. Something like that. A baby-faced Aamir Khan falls in love with a baby-voiced Juhi Chawla. Parents are feuding. They run away, set up a quaint looking cottage in the forest. He can't forage, she can't cook. Depending on which way you see it, this could well be a Marxist tale on how the landed classes are useless and society needs to destruct. Ultimately, the two of them destruct (Oops, spoiler).

What's not to love? Spontaneity, singing in the back of hay filled trucks. Young foolish love. Stupid adults. Dying teens. And Aamir Khan. Different matter that he went on to star in a rather misogynist film called "Dil" full of feisty poor boys, spoilt rich girls who must then be tamed, and yes, stupid adults. Clearly he had the market cornered on the last. (Go here if you want to see what I'm talking about). For the longest time, I loved QSQT. I mean, sure, I still do. But I was attached to the idea of running away for love. Or something. The operative word being "running".

Then came Maine Pyar Kiya or "I Have Loved" of scrawny Salman Khan and squeaky Bhagyashree fame. Which was the opposite of running. The director of this film, the Right Honorable Shri Sooraj Barjatya as we all well know by know, is all about family. Even more than Karan Johar. Who is all about loving your family. But they are both about giant staircases. And household help that is "like" family. And pride. Of some misbegotten form or the other. But I digress. So MPK in short is all about the poor girl who comes to stay with her poor father's rich friend and falls in love with the rich dad's unspoilt son. So rich son has to then leave his father's house and prove to the poor girl's traumatized father that he can earn as much as him. All that masculinity and pathetic rite of passage-ness almost did me in. And let's not forget the heroine's amazingly coquettish passivity either. How very wonderful of her.

I have watched this film a grand total of sixteen times. Yes, I had a lot of time then. And good Lord, did I pay. For a short period of time, I wasn't sure if I could maintain cross-gender friendships. After all, hadn't the film effectively demonstrated how "a girl and a boy can never be friends"? (If you have the patience, go here to see Hindi translation of aforementioned) And yes, I know the rest of that dialogue too. For the longest time, I thought I had to go stay at someone else's house, preferably someone with teenage progeny. And finally, for the longest time, I had a crush on Salman Khan. I mean, glance up at that poster. What of that hairy chest is not to love? Again, a film on the rank, dank, seriousness of boy protecting girl, and class warfare mediated by love.

But on a more serious note, while I have thankfully left these behind, what it does demonstrate is the remarkable lack of imagination in popular Hindi movies of that time. The tinny texture, the pathetic subjecthood, the resoundingly arrogant social fabric, and yes, the staircases.

So then, now having effectively come to cynicism, agency, and my twenties, I moved on to the next part of my narrative.

(b) Loss. And masculinity. And music. And here is where comes the pivotal role played by (drum roll please).... Amitabh Bachchan.

All the Amitabh movies I love are from the seventies and early eighties. But I watched them through my growing years. Uniformly, they are all about a quiet, seething masculinity. Where love is something that happens in the background. Invariably other duties take precedence. Mainly mother, pride, revenge, and nation. And as a corollary, often loss of love. Through death. Or dutiful marriage. In this narrative, role-playing is paramount. We all have names. And people with names do certain things. So Amitabh for example, was the "Angry young man", the operative words being "angry" and "man".

Again, what's not to love? Remember, I had neither come to feminism nor postmodernity. Sure, in regular life I was both and amply so. Just that in my fantasies, somebody had to come rescue me from these twin burdens.

And the music, the music.

In this narrative, things all have their due place. And I must confess I was quite a structuralist then. Name, place, animal thing all had their due position in the hierarchy and together, we were all involved in the giant plot that made the world turn. And I always think of Faiz in this scenario.

Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again
Faiz Ahmad Faiz

That which then was ours, my love,
don’t ask me for that love again.
The world then was gold, burnished with light –
and only because of you. That’s what I had believed.
..............

All this I’d thought, all this I’d believed.
But there were other sorrows, comforts other than love.
...
Bitter threads began to unravel before me
as I went into alleys and in open markets
saw bodies plastered with ash, bathed in blood.
I saw them sold and bought, again and again.
This too deserves attention. I can’t help but look back
when I return from those alleys –what should one do?
And you still are so ravishing –what should I do?
There are other sorrows in this world,
comforts other than love.
Don’t ask me, my love, for that love again. (For full poem, go here)...

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Translation By Agha Shahid Ali

© 1991, 1995 by Agha Shahid Ali

The man acts, the woman waits. And the most agentive figure in this is of course the courtesan who loses her heart to the hero who is pining for the heroine but cannot have her because he must do the right thing. Which is get drunk at the courtesan's. And realize at some point that he might as well be in love with here. This thankfully never structured my narrative.

I must confess bits of this narrative still linger. It's primarily laziness. I just want a bigger cause than a small period of heterosexual bliss. I mean, think about it. Isn't the idea of a fatal saga or a national struggle much more seductive than marital stupor, dirty dishes, and a bourgeois home? Come on now.

(c) And finally now that the thirties are in vogue, we come to the current narrative. Complexity. And this as we all know doesn't come from the movies. This can only come from that beautiful modern invention, the novel. And from poetry. And from prose. I have no words to add here. I will let the words speak for themselves.

Better, thought the young Samana,
To make sacrifices to the fair Kamala,
Than to make sacrifices to the Gods.
-- Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse'.

-- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

It's our age. We think we know that the miracle is a lie and we always look for a hidden or suppressed explanation. We would rather have greed and lust as motive than love. We are reassured by slyly mocking references to our squalor, our smells and our expulsions, than our trembling modesty, or to our quivering desire for affection. We are not even allowed souls any more, and our secret inner spaces are merely sites of unresolved turmoil, raw with throbbing wounds.
-- Desertion; Abdulrazak Gurnah

We've spent years living inside each other. I've loved you since that first second I saw you, standing at the top of the stairs in that ugly gray T-shirt with black paint on it. You stank of sweat that day, and you looked me over like I was some object you were about to buy in a store. For some reason, that cold, strict, look in your eyes made me crazy with love for you, but I didn't show you a thing. I was too proud.

-- What I Loved, Siri Hustvedt

Is there anything left to say? For one, this mini essay has been about coupling. And not about the many forms of love that populate our existence. I plead space. And a dinner going rapidly lukewarm. And yes, war. And of course, global warming.

So here are my last two cents. Mediation is all around. But we can also find formless love, escape narrative, and merely be sensate. We can find love for the taking. In all its forms. In myriad sets of people. We do not need to set our hearts on one true love, we need not make one person the bearer of all our narrative burdens. We can give love as much as we walk around hungry for it. And therefore, as a little February 13th missive, let me just say this. I hope you are all happy for the love you do receive and I hope you can remember to show some. Tonight, I have flowers on my sill and snow outside my window. It's warm in here.


Goodnight fine folks.

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune -- without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

-- Emily Dickinson

The Emperor's New Clothes

It's 2012. It's been a month and it's only just sinking in. So I made us new clothes to celebrate the year's birthday. And mine.

It's just another artifical marker I know. Just another excuse to have four sleepless nights in a row and contemplate beginnings. But I suppose we all need the possibility of fresh starts. And reminders that there will always be music. And love. And newness.

This is the tenth year of this blog. I've been rambling for a decade now. It's really quite pleasing though. It's not that I believe this life is worth chronicling, just that the practice of chronicling is important. If I don't record, I will forget how to remember.

I’ve managed a respectable 49 posts for 2011; that’s an average of 4 posts a month, a post a week. Given that January is already out of the way, I have a lot of catching up to do for 2012. There is a lot to be written. I've been away over December and January traveling to four cities and peeking into many lives. L.A, New York, Princeton, and San Juan in a month. And it's been exhausting and immensely fulfilling. I've realized how much lighter it makes me to travel. I do like home. And its stability. But it also weighs me down. And makes me rather curmudgeonly. I have to get away. I realize this is a luxury that I have increasingly become used to but I also think there are bigger lessons hidden in this restlessness. So in no particular order, here are some learnings I have corralled:

(a) The more I travel the

better I pack. The less I pack, the

more I travel. But here is the other problem. I also like having nice clothes when I travel. So

then I have to come up with better ways of packing while continuing to travel as much as I do.

(b) It helps to be up early when traveling. You see more and you experience new places in their every mood. Also, since coming back home, I've been up at six every morning. For those who know me, this signals nothing short of the apocalypse.

(c) Talk to people. Even when they tell you things like "Who are you hoping to attract if you wear clothes like that? " (This from a charming British dotard who apparently didn't like that my t-shirt said "Let's go spacetrucking")

(d) Stay at a place where you can cook. Eating out all the time is debilitating. Cooking for yourself and/or feeding others helps maintain a tiny sense of home, a home that travels. Even if people steal your food. It just means that you cook well.

(e) Give up on sleep. Especially if like us you end up in a hostel with many snoring teenagers of various persuasions and nationalities. Think of it as early training for parenthood. Or persuasion for contraception.

(f) Brave the weather. If going somewhere sunny, do not fear a tan. Even if, like me, you already have copious amounts of melanin. Go darker. Sock it to the fair and lovelies of the world. If escaping to chilly terrain, do not glue yourself to the fireplace. Layer up. Wear bright colors. Look ridiculous in bunny coats. Get out.

(g)Find some music. Go dancing.

(h)Read a book. Always. I cannot say this enough. Read a book. The book will take on the textures of the place. Your memories will double up. And your companions will thank you for shutting up for at least some part of the day.

(i) Flirt.

(j) Lastly, make friends. Remember to leave open the possibility of going back.

That's ten for travel. I only have three more to set the tone for 2012 blogging.

(1) Write.

(2) Edit.

(3) Insert pretty pictures.

And finally, finally, finally, my one resolution for what promises to be an exciting, difficult, demanding,and

hopeful year.

Lightness. The kind that hinges the day while letting it swing. The kind that sees and knows and deals and lives and sings and shouts and sleeps and wakes up. Serious, wizened, light as gossamer lightness.

Happy New Year lovely folks.

Memento Mori

Dev Anand died last week. He was 88.


I feel a distinct sense of loss. For a figure I had almost forgotten and for a life I had tucked away.

Dev Anand was no ordinary 88 year old. He was what the film magazines called the "evergreen hero"; one who had been acting since 1946 and hadn't delivered a hit or any movie of notice in the last two decades. This is the man credited with having "discovered" various actresses who then, in his own narrative, went onto become highly successful stars. Zeenat Aman is only among a long list. And for those who have forgotten Zeenat Aman (shame on you!), here's a reminder.



In various places, he is described as "The man who provided glimpse of different foreign countries through his cinematic oeuvre", India's "Gregory Peck", and "the longest serving matinee idol of Bollywood cinema."

What do I know or remember about Dev Anand? That he featured in these heartbreakingly beautiful songs. Of joy, and life, and love, and loss, and mischief, and coy flirting. That the black and white films of his that I consider part of my childhood were filled with content. And they were all undeniably urbane. They were about people caught in circumstances that allowed them to attain a notion of who they wanted to become. They were films about jaunty men, mysterious disappearances, recovery of love, the discovery of self, and magnificent women. They were scripts adapted from Ismat Chughtai and R.K.Narayan and froze for us the story of urban India and it's urbane men and women, be they working class taxi drivers, and bar dancers, or paying guests, con men, and middle-class women in unhappy marriages.

And I am trying to isolate the reasons why I feel desolate. And mulling the folly of mourning the death of a public figure who had been all but forgotten, his poor film choices over the years since the seventies decried and ridiculed. And for those who think he's managed anything interesting since "Hare Rama Hare Krishna", please go watch this; I did, in Jaipur's Raj Mandir no less.


The act of mourning, as most of us well know by now is never about anybody but ourselves and our vanishing sense of memory and temporality. We rely on friends, family, actors, films, and songs to preserve for us our childhood, our youth, our tremulous possibilities, and the many other lives we could have and have led. Every now and then we turn to them to recover the joie de vivre of an assumed immortality and vigor. And then they leave and the thought that we have left something behind with them is a difficult thought.

When I try and write about the role of film in Indian public culture, what I have most difficulty in capturing is its affective density, the sense that it permeates lives far deeper than mere symbolism. It doesn't stand in for life, it is life. I have lived with film as fantasy, as possibility, and as the material of the air I breathe.

Songs, for example, I experience as triggers of places, and smells, and food, and people. They form the background score and the very articulation of my mental picture albums. They stand in for dusky evenings and tightly bound clusters of singing voices, attempting rhythm, melody and kinship. Shooshan and I used to sing "Abhi na jao chodkar" on the footpath by the row of buildings where I set up my first apartment. "Mana Janab Ne Pukara Naheen" is one of the first songs I learnt to play on the mandolin. My ability to sing the entire "Hai apna dil tho awaara" ensured that I would always be on a winning antakshari team. "Nazar lagi raja tore bangle pe" was the song I hummed in bad tune with a professor from grad school. And on long train journeys from Bombay to Madras, strangers and I sang "Yeh Dil Na hota bechara", "Accha jee main haari", and "Dil Ka Bhanwar Kare Pukar" in temporary cohort as we headed to the place where no one spoke Hindi.

The films of Dev Anand are also a reminder that in the eighties, I was watching and listening to songs from films from the fifties and sixties on an old Panasonic recorder that my parents bought in the seventies. Bombay in the film was still recognizable to me as Bombay from my weekend trips into the city. Radio Ceylon had a designated hour to play what they called "Bhoole Bisre Geet" or forgotten songs. And these were the songs I most had the capacity to remember.

In an age when google is said to have robbed us of the capacity of memory, we feel loss more intensely even as we only feel it for a few seconds at a time. This then is the desolation and the forlornness of losing something so long forgotten that I have trouble naming it. And I do not know if I mourn Dev Anand, or the time of Dev Anand.

A Little Tooth

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

-- Thomas Lux