Only Children Have Homes

Warning: Some spoilers

The Wisconsin Film Festival is in town as part of which I watched seven films this week. Yes, seven. Yes, I am that focused. Or jobless. In any case, don't make me digress!

Wednesday, the first night of the festival, I saw a film called Monsieur Lazhar. Besides the lyrical beauty of the title (try saying it a few times), I have always been a sucker for teacher-student tales, of the right kind. Think "Mr.Holland's Opus" or "School of Rock" or the fantastic "The Class". And no, "Dead Poets' Society" is not on my list.

And so I went to see Monsieur Lazhar. Set in Montreal, the story progresses over a few months in the lives of a class of elementary school children, whose teacher commits suicide and is found hanging in the classroom by one of the students. The desperate principal hires Algerian immigrant Bachir Lazhar who shows up at school upon reading the news and volunteers his services. Over the course of the film, we see ways in which Bachir Lazhar's demons as much as the children's converge upon the ways in which systems and ideologies release subjects into their own nightmares. And this really is the crux of the film. The children are marvelously restrained actors, and the performances are unforced and remarkably poignant. They remind you of the precious and precarious time that childhood can be, where safety means a few things that leave one defenseless in their absence. The film is joyful, yet melancholic and sad, yet reassuring. It invites one to inhabit the borders where adults and children meet. The things the big peoople say, the things the small ones hear, the heartbreaking hurt on both sides and yet the mutual ability to redeem one another. Unequivocally recommended.

On a complete aside, I thought of Monsieur Lazhar again when watching this strange, strange film.



I would recommend seeing this too, just because I want to know you guys think of it. Based on and built around W.G.Sebald's "Rings of Saturn", the film attempts to both showcase and examine the author's pet themes of memory, loss, and decay. It is a melancholic explanation of melancholia. And it did manage to invoke thought long after I had left the theatre. However, one thing stood out and this is what reminded me of Monsieur Lazhar. An author attempting to explain Sebald's search for a meaningful home while walking through Suffolk strikingly brings attention to the fact that only children have a home, not adults. That sealed, controlled, hermetic, safe environment that is sufficiently amenable to our will is a product of our childhood not adulthood. And hence, children must continue to have that home. If only so that they can have something to be nostalgic about. And Lazhar has this to say about the classroom in one instance - "“A classroom is a place of friendship, of work, of courtesy, a place of life.”

And as I walked out of the various theaters I have been in this week, I could not help but be reminded that is also part of my task. I teach undergraduates, seventeen to twenty year olds with well formed personalities, far more awareness, and far less fear. It's easier. I doubt I would ever have the courage to teach schoolchildren. I find some of my greatest joy in class, in talk, in sharing. It took me a while to get here. As a graduate student, the classroom was merely a showcase for my skills and a platform upon which I strode and roared, flailing to camouflage my insecurities. I was hard on students, and even worse, harsh. As I grow older, as I read more, and attempt to write some, my insecurities have been replaced by the ability to be collectively wondrous, to share in that first moment when the class and I discover something together. Where once in a while I can strum a perfect sentence, but much more importantly, where students rearticulate my confused words and render them into something beautiful.

And I think of my own teachers and the memories they left me, and the notion of them that I hold on tight to, in the hope that the world will not decay. That maybe I will return to the kind of life where Mr.Apte taught me to draw and I tried for hours on end to render light and shadow on a vase. And discover how wonderful and new it can be to capture twilight on an object. That maybe Mrs.Akhawe who passed away far too young and far too cruelly is waiting by the fence to remind me to get back to math homework, because unlike my disbelieving self, she knew she could teach me into competence. That perhaps Victoria Jelki will know how in some other life she gave me my one true anchor, novels; by reading aloud from them in sixth grade (If you must know, it was Omen. Yes, don't ask). In that world, Mrs.Sahasrabuddhe runs through Sanskrit grammar as I listen distractedly hoping to get home in time for Remington Steele. And she patiently steers me to a 100 in the exams. Yes, a 100. And Ms.Anuradha Raman looks a vision and all the girls want to look like her and share their lunch boxes with her and of course, we are not surprised when she leaves to begin work as an air hostess. And we must of course mention Professor.A.Y.Joshi, my economics professor and Professor Anil Kulkarni, my marketing professor, who are as erudite as they look and give me something that I can aspire to, the corporeality of knowledge.

And this world is important, because in order to continue to hold onto its truth, I must work harder, feel stronger, delve deeper. And above all, I must care.

Two nights

Bombay, April 5, 2011: The city looks reassuring at night. Lights out. I'm in a car buzzing alongside condominiums, shuttered shops, hazy garbage lined streets, and intrepid dogs. The buildings loom large. In the vertical distance, one lone flickering bulb indicates midnight prevarications, insomnias, and muddled sleep. There are still people on the streets. A lone figure adjusts his backpack and crosses the street. He walks straight in search of home.

Madison, April 5, 2011: The city looks ghostlier at night. One longs for the return of day. The quiet of day solidifies into the loneliness of night. Orderly people have been tucked away into orderly beds. The shops are brightly lit to deter thieves and the homeless. Security systems watch over the lifeless objects of daytime happiness. I'm in a bus with large windows and the moon shines right through. It is am almost-full moon night.

The Real

Guest post courtesy Deepak Kaw
















All images © Deepak Kaw

The Real is thus, in effect, all three dimensions at the same time: the abyssal vortex which ruins every consistent structure; the mathematized consistent structure of reality; the fragile pure appearance.
-- Slavoj Zizek, For they Know Not What They Do

I am nothing
I will never be anything
I cannot desire to be nothing
Moreover, I carry in me all the dreams of the world.
-- Tobacco Shop, Fernando Pessoa

A Hundred Word Story

The air pressed down into his throat pincer-like and oppressive. He felt deformed and grotesque; his eyebrows felt singed and his fingers distended. He attempted upward movement only to meet his chest pressing downward in violent fashion. He pushed his voice out and heard in the distance a faint echo of self. Trying to fight the urge to delay consciousness, he counted in his head, each number interspersed with a hundred pointed splinters, tearing and shredding the surface of an unfelt body.

And then he heard someone say, “He will live. It will take a while. But he will live.”

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.