Hello mutineers! I’ve been holed up in my east-coast satellite bunker for a while now, perfecting my Gleeson Grip, watching test cricket and savagely turning my back on a lacto-vegetarian upbringing.
I have been trying to keep up, however, and came upon this little gem of an article via our newstab (thanks Brij), relating the life of a peculiar kind of Yogi–one who may be tempted by “Extreme” branded potato chips.
The New York Times has a behind-the-scenes look at a new version of Phillip Glass’s modernist opera, “Satyagraha,” which is playing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York until May 1. There is also a companion video piece, which I could watch but not listen to from the computer I’m working on this morning.
The libretto uses the Bhagavad-Gita as a source, and the opera as a whole aims to index some of the key events in Gandhi’s early political awakening in South Africa with the plot and text of the Gita. That alone might be a little confusing, since the central question facing Arjuna in the Gita, as most readers will know, is whether or not to fight — and Gandhi’s signature political contribution (“Satyagraha”) is the philosophy of non-violent resistance. The choice could of course be defended depending on your interpretation of the Gita, and indeed, I gather that Gandhi did his own translation — with commentary — of the Bhagavad-Gita in 1924. I haven’t read Gandhi’s version, though I should note that it has recently been re-published as a volume called Bhagavad-Gita According to Gandhi.
The current interpretation of Glass’s work adds some new elements, including a strong focus on newsprint and newspaper culture as a theme in Gandhi’s story (that at least seems dead-on). There are also towering puppets, made of “newspaper, fiberglass kite poles, light cotton cloth and lots of latex glue,” which symbolize historical figures from Gandhi’s past (Tolstoy), present, and future (MLK).
It seems like an interesting work, though I have to admit I’m not sure I personally would enjoy it. (And most tickets under $100 have already been sold out, so it’s not something where a person would go casually…) Has anyone seen this? Is anyone planning to? Continue reading
Especially if you are a smart, attractive, single desi woman. Seriously. This isn’t about desi women in particular but you’ll see how this information could be used for evil especially by desi parents. I know some of you forward posts to your parents but don’t do it with this one. You’ve been warned. NSFP=Not Safe for Parents.
Ok, now that I’ve cleared my conscience let’s get to the article at hand shall we? Slate.com recently published, The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which makes use of game theory to explain why the best women often end up single and alone if they wait “too long” to get married. We’ll save judgement for the end:
The shortage of appealing men is a century-plus-old commonplace of the society melodrama. The shortage–or–more exactly, the perception of a shortage–becomes evident as you hit your late 20s and more acute as you wander into the 30s. Some men explain their social fortune by believing they’ve become more attractive with age; many women prefer the far likelier explanation that male faults have become easier to overlook.
The problem of the eligible bachelor is one of the great riddles of social life. Shouldn’t there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?…Actually, no–and here’s why. Consider the classic version of the marriage proposal: A woman makes it known that she is open to a proposal, the man proposes, and the woman chooses to say yes or no. The structure of the proposal is not, “I choose you.” It is, “Will you choose me?” A woman chooses to receive the question and chooses again once the question is asked. [Link]
So what have we learned so far? Despite the fact that men usually propose, it is the woman that typically dictates if and when a marriage will occur. In a free and modern society (meaning no forced or pressured marriages) the real power rests with the woman. Let’s go on then:
You can think of this traditional concept of the search for marriage partners as a kind of an auction. In this auction, some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so.In game-theory terms, you would call the first group “strong bidders” and the second “weak bidders.” Your first thought might be that the “strong bidders”–women who (whether because of looks, social ability, or any other reason) are conventionally deemed more of a catch–would consistently win this kind of auction.
But this is not true. In fact, game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by “weak” bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively, while the “strong” bidders will hold out for a really great deal. [Link]
One of the things that marks me as an ABD is the fact that the Indian national anthem leaves me cold. Largely that’s because I don’t identify as an Indian politically, but it’s also in part because most national anthems don’t move me. The Star Spangled Banner, for example, is a horrible song. I feel something when I hear it only because I am an American and am conditioned to do so, but honestly I’d far rather have a song like the Marseillaise which is actually catchy.
The first rendition of Jana Gana Mana is sung phonetically by Kenyans who make it sound a bit like church music – it loses the rhythm that it has when Indians sing it, but it becomes etherial and quite haunting (courtesy Chick Pea):
The second rendition is A.R. Rehman’s bombastic cover, as if John Phillip Sousa decided to set a lullaby to 24 tubas:
Do you guys have a favorite version of the anthem? How about the other regional national anthems (none of which I know) – Pakistan? Bangladesh? Lanka? Nepal? Afghanistan? Feel free to share youtube links but no rickrolling please …
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. The book I previously gushed over won the fiction prize. A Pakistan-born photojournalist named Adrees Latif of Reuters won for his picture of a journalist shot and killed by the military in Myanmar. What moved me deeply however, was reading the article that won the “Feature Writing” award. I need to provide some background before we get into that.
Normally I wouldn’t blog about a story that was one year old and has no explicit desi angle. Many of you probably already read it. However, there is something universal about the…incident…chronicled in this article. One of the things I have come to appreciate about a blogging community like SM is that we (bloggers and commenters) get to share our appreciation (or criticism) of art with each other. Whether it is via the comment section of a book review or in the form of a heads-up about some upcoming event, blogs make great forums to share thoughts which may be incongruous with the rest of our days. Regardless of why you visit SM in particular, I think the bloggers here feel pretty honored that you would “waste” part of your day on our site, reading what we produce (even if you know you could do much better). Just this morning I was visiting Unclutterer to figure out how to waste less time during the day and to streamline my chaotic life. Sitting here typing this now (instead of packing for a business trip tomorrow) I’ve changed my mind. We should stop and waste time during the day if it so moves us.
And that brings me to the year old article from the Washington Post that won a Pulitzer today. You can’t read it yet, however. First you have to play this audio file. Once you start listening to it you can move on to the next line.
It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?… [Link]
Writer Gene Weingarten helped orchestrate a brilliant “stunt” on commuters passing through L’Enfant Plaza last January in order to take a stab at settling the debate above. He took one of the most gifted violin players in the world, dressed him up as a humble busker in jeans, and asked him to play his 3.5 million dollar violin on the metro platform. Who would recognize brilliance? Who would even stop?
Pankaj Mishra writes a detailed review of Pico Iyer’s new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in the recent issue of the New Yorker. Mishra’s review makes it evident that Iyer has elicited a far more complex story of the Dalai Lama than is typically shoveled to and slurped up by the West. Instead of treating him merely as a figure to be awed, Iyer describes him as “Forrest Gumpish,” simple yet revolutionary. He is a religious leader who is actively attempting to weaken the dogma of his own religion:
Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America…Precepts such as “violence breeds violence” or “the quality of means determine ends” may be ethically sound, but they don’t seem to possess the intellectual complexity that would make them engaging as ideas. Since the Dalai Lama speaks English badly, and frequently collapses into prolonged fits of giggling, he can also give the impression that he is, as Iyer reports a journalist saying, “not the brightest bulb in the room…” [Link]
But, would a “dull bulb” espouse an idea as revolutionary as this:
The most famous Buddhist in the world, he advises his Western followers not to embrace Buddhism. He seeks out famous scientists with geekish zeal, asserting that certain Buddhist scriptures disproved by modern science should be abandoned. [Link]
Can you imagine the Pope coming out to say to Catholics, “Yeah. I guess science and statistics do show that condoms are a good idea after all. Let’s git rid of the whole no birth control part of the religion.”
Jhumpa Lahiri’s much-awaited collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, hits bookshelves this week. As she makes her way around the US on an eight-city tour (she has a sold-out reading at Symphony Space tonight), gushing reviews have started pouring in. 
The Village Voice’s Lenora Todaro compares Lahiri to a “young Alice Munro” and praises the emotional wisdom of these stories. [link]
Eight long short stories (three of which were previously published in the New Yorker) make up this striking collection whose title was inspired by a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same wornout soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
The Christian Science Monitor [link] says of Unaccustomed Earth: “Returning to themes she explored in her first novel, “The Namesake,” Pulitzer-Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri details with quiet precision the divide between American-born children and their Bengali parents in her new short-story collection.”
I disagree. I don’t think this book is so much about the divide between generations as it is about the lives of the second-generation, the lives of the children of immigrants. The parents here play a secondary role – they are lenses through which children grow to understand themselves better.
Lisa Fugard of the Los Angeles Times gets it when she writes [link], “In her latest work, “Unaccustomed Earth,” a powerful collection of short stories, those children have left home and are starting families of their own, as they struggle both with tangled filial relationships and the demands of parenthood. The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”
In New York magazine’s profile of Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Confidence Artist: Jhumpa Lahiri Isn’t Afraid to Provoke Tears” [link], Boris Kachka writes:
Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobile South Asians from New England, and so is the novel she’s working on. “ ’Is that all you’ve got in there?’ I get asked the question all the time,” says Lahiri. “It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more important than that.”
Yes, Lahiri’s latest stories are once again about Bengali Americans, many of them set in Cambridge and London (where she was born), but keep going and it’s obvious that she has gone further and deeper, taken a turn in another direction, choosing to write about the experiences of second-generation Indian-Americans, about their fraught relationships with their parents, about multi-racial marriages, and at the end of it all, the human condition. (Elsewhere in Unaccustomed Earth, she takes us to Italy, Thailand, London, but what she does keep coming back to is Mass., Cambridge.)
Discussion over an article published Sunday night on the NY Times website dominated my email inbox today. Given the fact that so many SM readers are hyper-literate (or at least think they are) this simply had to be shared, discussed, and dissected to death here as well. Ready yourselves:
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about … their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)… [Link]
I confess, I went to theatlassphere.com to see if Vinod had posted a dating ad there. The article goes on to conclude that you must be incredibly shallow if you dump someone based openly (or secretly) on the fact that their taste in literature sucks compared to yours. In fact, it wasn’t until I read this article that I wondered, for the first time in my life, if I was shallow. Am I destined to be “Baioed“? Not only would the pre-32 year old Abhi break up with a girl if she had ever in her life waited in a line for a Harry Potter book, he may also have dumped her if she didn’t like Mos Def The Cure (yes, I am a music snob as well). However, the new Abhi is reflective about the depth of his shallowness, mostly because he had been completely unaware of it until recently. The new Abhi wants to change. There have always been hints. Let me tell you all about one recent break-up. Well, it still feels recent but I guess it has actually been a while.
Continue reading
To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets in a “Poetry Friday” series all month long. Here’s the last of four installments (1, 2, and 3.)
Songs are poetry, and singer-songwriter Rupa Marya has been on my radar for the past couple of weeks, ever since I found out about her world music band Rupa and the April Fishes
(think the Indigo Girls meets traces of 
Natalie Merchant meets “classic French chanson, Argentinean tango, Gypsy swing, American folk, Latin cumbias, and even hints of Indian ragas”). [It turns out that Abhi wrote about them last year. link]
The group’s debut album “Extraordinary Rendition” has been picked up by Cumbancha, a record label founded by the head of music research and product development at Putomayo World Music, Jacob Edgar. It releases on May 1, and Rupa and her gang are in the middle of a North American tour that includes NYC and the Montreal Jazz Festival.
A musician, songwriter, and (yes!) physician, the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants spent part of her childhood in France. Many of the songs on the band’s new album are in French. From an article in the SF Chronicle:
The years between the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 and the 2004 presidential election changed her outlook on life and prompted [Marya] to alter her sound completely, by writing in French.“What happens if you communicate … in a way that people who don’t speak that language can understand what you’re saying?” Marya says. “Especially when the world was becoming much more afraid of differences. That’s when everything sort of took off into another place.
Her song Une Américaine à Paris, I think, conveys some of her post 9/11 reflections. The lyrics (reprinted with permission of Rupa and the April Fishes) follow, both in the original French and in Rupa’s English translation.
There’s a profile in the New York Times of Chetan Bhagat (thanks, Pocobrat), author of One Night @ The Call Center, which was released in the U.S. on paperback last year. Bhagat, an author few in the west will have heard of, has now become the biggest English-language author in Indian history:
But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history, according to his publisher, Rupa & Company, one of India’s oldest and best established publishers. His story of campus life, “Five Point Someone,†published in 2004, and a later novel, “One Night @ the Call Center,†sold a combined one million copies.
Mr. Bhagat, who wrote his books while living here, has difficulty explaining why a 35-year-old investment banker writing in his spare time has had such phenomenal success reaching an audience of mainly middle-class Indians in their 20s. The novels, deliberately sentimental in the tradition of Bollywood filmmaking, are priced like an Indian movie ticket — just 100 rupees, or $2.46 — and have won little praise as literature.
“The book critics, they all hate me,†Mr. Bhagat said in an interview here. (link)
Yes, it’s true, we do hate him.
I read One Night @ The Call Center a few months ago, when the American publisher sent me a review copy. Some parts were so bad, they made me cry. I was particularly bored by the chapters detailing the protagonist’s unrequited romance, which are set off in bold type for some reason (though the fact that they are set off in bold is actually useful — the font makes it easier to identify the chapters to skip!).
That said, the novel does have some amusing cultural commentary scattered here and there, and I suspect it’s the book’s candor on the grim–yet economically privileged–experience of overnight call center workers that has made Bhagat so popular. That, and the book is so easy it could be read by a stoned dog on a moonless night.
Here is one passage, on accents, I thought interesting: Continue reading