Letters

I want to send letters. I want to write letters. On paper. Instead of looking at pictures of friends on facebook, I want them to write to me describing their life. When you write a letter, you create a story, a narrative, about yourself, and everyone around you. Letters have a physical existence, which cannot be snuffed out by pressing the delete button. Sure, you can burn them or lose them, but they can also be around for really long.  I've read letters sent to my mother from my father, from my grandmother to my father, from my great-grandmother to her daughter. All these letters are anything but bland descriptions of life. They include heartfelt emotions, philosophical ruminations, and hilarious anecdotes. These were the days before instant communication, and they are not so long back. From 1999 to 2001, my dad was posted in Kashmir, and he lived in an area where decent phones were non-existent. Talking to him was only possible on a garbled Army phone line where only one of us could talk at the same time. Therefore the conversation usually went like this, I’d say, “Hello, Dad. Over.”( In the manner of a radio operator, telling the other person that I have finished speaking)  My dad would reply, “Hi, son. Over.” Such conversations were finished with an ‘Over and Out’. Having such conversations was just a sort of reassuring exercise where we would have heard the other's voice. 

The only way to have a conversation about the details in our life was writing letters. Those letters to my father when he lived away from us were the only letters I ever wrote. I bought a letter pad and wrote letters 1 or 2 pages long telling him what I did at school, who my friends were and the wonderful food that Mom was making. He'd write back, describing the mountains, the bunker he lived in, fishing for trout in the freshwater lake they lived near, when he's coming back home, and there'd be photographs of him standing in the snow attached. I never wrote any letters after that, I think, except one to my grandfather many years ago.

Sure, phones improved, the next time Dad got posted to Kashmir, we could talk, and then came email, then Orkut, and Facebook, and smartphones and BBM, and now wherever anyone I know is, I can talk to, or send a message instantly. It is a good thing you know, but is my communication with people on the internet a record or reflection of me. I don't send any long, personal emails to my friends or family, people I haven't met for years are online at the same time as me, but I, and they, don’t care. People chat with me online, asking, “How's life?” and I reply with a banal, one line answer. Then they reply with their own banal, one line answer. I send impersonal birthday greetings to people on facebook, and they send them to me. 

In contrast with this, someone's sent and received letters are a reflection of their life because they're inherently more personal, more confessional and more detailed. Letters tell us a lot about a person. Famous people's letters are published, because we want to know more about them, their correspondence is a record of their life.  To write a letter is to pause, to stop, and think and then to have the freedom to go on and on. The emotions just seem truer. Letters expressing love can be dramatic, filmy or even lame, but the ordinary correspondence of two people separated by time and space expressing that emotion can be rather beautiful too. There are still boxes full of letters sent by my parents to each other before they got married. Today, two people like that would probably Skype.

I want to feel the paper under my hand, as I write a letter, in longhand. The only writing I do physically is in exams. I want to write, for pleasure, and then fold the page I wrote on, put it an envelope, put stamps on it, and post it. Then I want you to do the same for me.

2 Weeks in South Bombay

There is something oddly beautiful about South Bombay. A sense of history, even though it’s far more recent than say, Delhi. I especially like Fort. All the buildings look old, are old. There are vast multitudes walking in the streets, every one rushing to work. It is also confusing, getting from one part to another means getting past a number of streets , most of them named after Parsis. Till now, I’ve seen the name of every famous Parsi person I know(not living) except Maneckshaw. And many I’ve never heard of. Even a gali which is barely 100 m long has its own name. The variety of food available within five minute’s walk of my office is mind-boggling. A quaint Irani cafe. Dosa places selling kinds of dosa I’ve never heard of in Bangalore. Seafood. Vada Pao, Samosa Pao, Misal Pao and Cutting Chai. The Sandwich, nothing like I’ve tasted before. It feels odd asking for Pani Puri and not Gol Gappe. Three different Parsi restaurants. Kababs, and generic Veg restaurants which sell everything from Pao Bhaji to Puri Bhaji. One side out of Fort is Kala Ghoda. The Jehangir Art Gallery, and everything around it. The museum. Walk a little. Flora Fountain, or Hutathma Chowk. Doesn’t the marble fountain with angels, made in 1869 look better than the monument dedicated to the leaders of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement with its divisive message ‘Jai Maharashtra’? I bought an old book there, for very cheap. 

Very close is Churchgate, for local train travel. Otherwise, if you take the subway, there is Eros Cinema on the other side. Not very far is the Oxford India Bookstore. Sometimes I drank tea, sometimes coffee, and read half a book without buying it.

My fourth day in Bombay, I still haven’t seen the sea. As I get out of office, I decide to walk. Fifteen minutes later, I’m at the Gateway of India. Police don’t check my bag. The Taj Mahal Hotel is just beautifully lit up. I see Colaba Causeway on the way. I go see Leopold, imagining it in the 70s. My Shantaram moment done, I know it’s too expensive for me right now. We walk behind the Hotel, see the cars, the buildings, and the odd mix of people. 

One day, my non-drinker friend sees a place and says, ‘Hey, that looks like a nice place for a beer’. I tell him he has good taste, but we can’t, it’s the Bombay Gymkhana. Every day I get out of Marine Lines, Azad Maidan on my left, and take the cab. My cabbie returns change when I pay him 20 bucks, without asking for it. I figure out, Cabs cost less here than autos in Bengalewdu. What a city!

However I sweat, more and more. But I drink Sugarcane juice, and feel refreshed. One night we go to Marine Drive. I’ve seen it on TV, and don’t really expect much. It is unexpectedly spectacular. The number of people out late, the lights. And finally, the breeze. On Sunday, we go to Hajji Ali. Dirty, insanely crowded. No spiritual feelings awakened. Chowpatty, then Marine Drive Again. NCPA Apartments look like nice place to stay. Find out they’re the most expensive apartments in the country. Ah, well.

Finally, back at the Gateway. On Sunday, it’s so crowded, we think of coming back later. There’s a line. People formed it, by themselves, voluntarily. What a city.

Jaipur Literary Festival: Day 1

I wrote this on the 2nd day of the Jaipur Literary Festival. I was too lazy to write descriptions of any other sessions and I can’t remember details of most others. Suffice to say it was an amazing experience and deserves a lot more written about it.

I’d left for Jaipur the night before the fest was scheduled to start. A night spent in a bus gives one a lot of time to think, and not much sleep. Ever since I knew I was going to Jaipur, I’d been willing myself through the exams with the promise of what was to come after. I anticipated seeing and meeting interesting people, see authors talk about their books and hear a dialogue on literature I hadn’t heard before. But oddly enough, the night before I reached I was worried that it would be an anti-climax. I fell asleep to that thought. The next day though I was excited. I reached Jaipur around 6:15 am and didn’t sleep at all after that and reached the Diggi Palace, the venue of the festival at 9:40, twenty minutes early. When I saw the huge crowds walking in along with me, I felt upbeat, and couldn’t stop smiling. There were a lot of pretty girls around, a consequence of anyone with any kind of literary pretensions from Delhi descending to Jaipur.

I walked in to strains of the Kirtan Gurbani sung by singers from the Golden Temple. The festival begun to a few speeches by various people, one of them to my delight being William Darlymple. The tension of Rushdie’s pulling out hung in the air. Most alluded to it in some way. The lamp was lit, and slowly, crowds started pouring in, a significant portion were foreigners. A lot of confused schoolchildren of varying ages were also around. The keynote address was delivered by Purushottam Aggarwal and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on Bhakti Poetry: The living legacy. Purushottam Aggarwal spoke mostly in Hindi and explained the legacy of Bhakti poetry as being different from that of submission and devotion and more akin to love arising out of relative equality. In Bhakti poetry, the Bhakta(Devotee) would show his Bhakti by treating his god like a lover, or a little naughty child( both alluding to Krishna). What was more interesting was what Mr Aggarwal said next. After showing the scope for dialogue and reason between the God and the Bhakta, he explained how the Bhakti poets were reactionaries of their times, who fought for the right to say what they want. He beautifully linked the spirit of Bhakti poetry to the spirit of Bhakti poetry to the spirit of free expression, and though he never explicitly said it, the allusion was clear (Hint: Salman Rushdie). Mr. Mehrotra then launched straightaway into some translations of Tamil Bhakti poets, like Tukaram. After some verses( translated in a very minimalist way), he regaled everyone with verses with the perspective of Tukaram’s wife and son, who curse Tukaram (and God) for his devotion to a God who does not give them the basic necessities of life, since he has turned Tukaram into his devotee. He next went into Kabir’s verses and translated many of them, focusing on verses which show his contempt for religion After some verses where Kabir made fun of Hinduism, there were more which made fun of Muslims and Islam. Mehrotra then wryly remarked that Kabir and Richard Dawkins would find a lot of common ground if they met each other!

Moares had arrived in the interim. I loved the beginning, and knew this was my kind of place to be. I looked around at the kind of sessions I could be at, and had the choice of a biographer of Tolstoy, a discussion of the Sikh gurus, and the award winning author of the English Patient, Michael Ondaatje. I chose Ondaatje even though I’d read the English Patient many years ago and had not read the book he was going to speak about. The person who was interviewing him, Amitava Kumar had also had also written a book I was really fond of, called Husband of a Fanatic. It was an interesting session, very focused on Ondaatje’s writing process, his aims when he writes, what he explores when he writes etc. He explained how he came to write his latest book. He saw a vision, of a boy boarding a ship, a journey he had himself made many years ago as an 11 year old boy going from Sri Lanka to England. He did not remember the journey, so he set out to write a fictional book about it. He said many things very specific to the books but there are certain things I remember and appreciated. He tends to look at multiple perspectives of different characters and bring the characters at the margins into the mainstream. His historical novels tend to look at the events whose stories were never told, those at the interstices of history. Amitava also went into a thread of the process of lost innocence which recurs in his works. I was also very interested in his writing process, a process I found very similar in another writer I admire, especially the way he begins. He sees an image and wants to write about that image. Then, as he himself said, he creates collages( a form of art he is interested in) and connects the dots together until they form a story. Also, he has no idea about what the books are going to be about until he writes them. Ondaatje spoke really well and I learnt and understood things I would never have heard of otherwise.

There were a lot of random rich people, bored students bored by what this festival was really about, people talking about books, and writing them. But so many people were interested, you could see it in their faces. I had some interesting choices in my next session, but I went for the big name one, David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker and biographer of Barack Obama, on supposedly the ‘Dissapointment of Obama’. Remnick sounded far from disappointed with Obama however. The session was very crowded and I was standing in the aisle. I had been looking forward to meeting Amitava Kumar earlier and asking him about his book but had lost him earlier and was thus late and had to stand. A man poked me from behind and asked me to move and I found it was Amitava Kumar himself. I promptly told him I loved a book of his. Then I spazzed out and temporarily rendered speechless didn’t remember the name of the book. He actually kept naming books he’d written till I remembered. Feeling exceedingly lame, I trooped off only to find a seat next to him again. Mortified though I was, I tried to talk to him but he seemed interested in something else and I let it go.

Coming back to Remnick, he described the phenomenon of Obama and how improbable it was. Though he stressed that race, that is being African American was a big part of Obama’s success, that was very specific to his own persona. He also explained that the fact of his race applied because of his specific persona, his diverse background and that advantage would not apply in case of most other African Americans. He rose from the position of state senator, a very insignificant position in American politics to the President because of his charisma, his persona and his circumstances. On Obama’s disappointment he explained that the main reason is the polarisation of American politics and how the Republicans wouldn’t let him do anything. He bashed the American Right of course and since I’d been watching the Daily Show for a while it was fun to see the liberal newsmedia in action. Man had charisma too, I had been very interested in American politics for a while, but he kept everyone enthralled, breaking everything down.

After some Papri Chat and Pushkar Chai in hot clay cups, I hung around at a session chaired by Barkha Dutt called Arab Spring: A Writer’s View which contained some writers from the Muslim world that is an Iranian woman, an Egyptian woman, a Palestinian man, an ‘expert’ American’ journalist and an Indian diplomat(presumably another expert)! First thing I noticed was Barkha Dutt is actually really good at her job, I had seen and saw subsequently badly moderated sessions but this one went off flawlessly. All the writers spoke about their experiences of the Arab Spring and their hopes for the future. Things looked bleak for the future in many of those countries and the conclusion seemed to be that the transition from dictatorship and democracy would not be seamless, it could be long and bloody, or it could certainly be delayed. Barkha Dutt kept pressing the women, saying that things are really getting worse for women after the regimes, be it Egypt or Libya, but the women only said that the situation was intolerable and though they don’t like the possible erosion of their rights, the old regime had to be changed. In the middle of this, I figured that there was a session with Pavan K Varma( a non-fiction writer I admire) and Gulzar and left for there. The next twenty minutes I was enthralled and watched both of them recite couplets in Urdu and English. Gulzar’s language is not very hard to understand( Urdu can get very grandiose and complicated) and even my limited Urdu vocabulary sufficed. Then they read out verses which Varma had written and Gulzar had translated. So, beautiful verses in English followed by even better verses in Urdu. Nice vivid imagery. Gulzar never changed the literal meaning but added something in translation that added a rhythm to them.

I stayed put after that because the man I’d come to see, Mohammed Hanif was next. He wrote one of my favourite books, The Case of Exploding Mangoes which was a thriller, satire set in Zia’s Pakistan which culminates with Zia’s assassination. I highly recommend that you read it. Anyway, Mohammed Hanif is brilliant, and very funny in real life. His self deprecating humour kept everyone in splits. His satire on Pakistani society and politics is laugh-out-loud and bitingly satirical at the same time. He writes in Punjabi, Urdu and English but writes his novels in English. He described how in Pakistan, he grew up with Punjabi as his mother tongue, but the funny thing about the education system in Pakistan is that he had to learn Urdu in school and not speak Punjabi and then later in life had to speak English and not Urdu. This multi lingual confusion certainly made him very good at all those languages( as l saw later also). I was happy now, a literary hero of mine more than measured up to my expectation, he was even funnier in real life than in his books! After asking a very stupid question, which I immediately regretted, I left, kind of content.

What I saw next did not leave me feeling as good. Brilliantly moderated by Siddarth Vardarajan( He’s now editor of the Hindu) was a session on Prison Diaries. Three people, Iftikhar Gilani, Anjum Zamarud Habib and Sahil Maqbool had been arrested for crimes they did not commit just because they were Kashmiri. Iftikhar Gilani we all know, was arrested after the Parliament attacks. Prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for a document that was publicly available, he spent many months in jail. All three described their experiences in prison that they’d written about and one wondered at the callousness of the Indian state which imprisoned them and so many other people. As Sahil pointed out, you know about us since we wrote our diaries but you don’t know any of the nameless, faceless people who have no one to speak for them. Iftikhar also made a plea to journalists. While he was in jail, he was regularly beaten up by jailors who read about his supposed ‘proved’ treachery in newspapers every day. These accounts had no sources and no truth to them. He pointed out that the common man takes what is written in a newspaper or on TV as the gospel truth, you have that power over people, please don’t misuse and abuse it.

Now, after a marathon first day, the last session. Jeet Thayil, well known poet had just released a book called Narcopolis which was about Bombay and drugs in the 70s and 80s. Ruchir Joshi, a journalist from Calcutta wrote a book called Poribartan about Mamata Bannerjee in Bengal. What followed was a surreal reading experience. The contrast between Jeet’s vivid, poetic, dark passages and Ruchir’s wry, anecdotal, funny accounts of the transition in Bengal was entertaining. They read one passage, each and I was drawn into the contrast. Then they read together, a certain passage and I’m pretty sure I was one of the first people in the room to figure out the passage’s content( having read the book in question). They were the offending passages in the Satanic Verses, read out with gay abandon. As soon as people started figuring out what it was, the clapping started. And it ended with a standing ovation. I later found out that Hari Kunzru and Amitav Kumar had done the same thing in the last session but they were stopped.

This laboriously written description cannot give you the sense of the place. A lot of people did not like the tamasha nature of the festival, the amount of people, the crowd from Delhi( especially Delhi University people, most of whom came to party) and many of them were regulars, nostalgic about its beginnings. However, for me, the people I met, the huge crowds that I navigated through, the Kachoris and Pushkar Chai, the conversations I overheard, the conversations that others overheard and joined, the stunning bookshop, the beautiful location, everything was part of what has been called the ‘greatest literary show on earth’. Sure, Rushdie didn’t come( and I very much wanted to see him) but so many other people did and I saw many of them speak. That’s what it was about, interesting people talking about literature and politics, often very subaltern rather than mainstream.( For example, many sessions on Bhakti poetry, poetry Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil , writing in Latin America, China, the Carribean, Africa). It is a place to discuss things which we don’t have a discourse about. Just go see the mind-boggling variety of sessions on offer in 2012. I’ll suggest if you ever have a chance, go. You’ll find something you like.