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Guest post: Malgudi and its place in the world of words.

From today's online edition of the Calcutta Telegraph.

THE DIGNITY OF THE SMALL PERSON IS IMPORTANT

W.H. Auden and R.K. Narayan have steered Alexander McCall Smith in the direction that his writing has followed

Returning, then, to the question which sparked these observations on influence: what has influenced me? The answer that I usually give is a brief one — my principal literary influences are that great poet, W.H. Auden, and that great novelist, R.K. Narayan. These are the two writers who, I think, steered me more than anybody else in the direction that my writing has followed. To this list I might add a stylistic, linguistic influence which I think was extremely important for me — the Book of Common Prayer, that great liturgical masterpiece that was used in the Anglican Church, including the Anglican churches in India, and indeed the Episcopal Church of Scotland, until it was largely replaced by the arid forms of modern liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer, alongside the Authorized Version of King James VI of Scotland and James I of England, gave great linguistic richness to the English language. The powerful Cranmerian prose of the Book of Common Prayer must have formed the deep linguistic patterns of many writers raised in observant households.

How did I get to R.K. Narayan? Well, I think that I can detect the outlines of the path that led me to that happy meeting. As a boy, I obviously had no experience of India. I was, however, born and spent my childhood in one of the last corners of the Empire, and so it is not surprising that I was exposed to Kipling. Now I know that there are many who have a low opinion of Kipling, and I do not wish to enter into the debate, but the fact of the matter is that some of my earliest reading was of The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories. Mowgli and Kim were very real to me, and I also remember being utterly entranced by Kipling’s story, “Rikki Tiki Tavi”, which I read so often that I could virtually recite it word for word. How painful it is to think back to those lost days, when one remembered the exact words of what one read — it is hardly possible to do that later in life.

But there I was reading Kipling’s Indian tales and being drawn subconsciously into a relationship with a country that I had never seen. India was to me a great, infinitely exciting place — I knew the names of the cities and could point to then on a map, and I had, no doubt, all sorts of exotic ideas about this country. That, I think, was the germ of my literary engagement with this country, even if it was planted by a writer now regarded as very old-fashioned. Of course, this was nothing unusual — there must have been vast numbers of people who were attracted to India in this way, just as today there are so many people who find themselves drawn to America through the powerful influence of their films. We feel that we can know a country although we do not know it, or only see it on the printed page or in the flickering images of the screen.

As a young man, my engagement with literary India continued to be somewhat unusual, mediated as it was through the work of a writer of the Indian diaspora, who rarely wrote about India itself, and by a writer who, having married into the country, came to it from outside. These authors were the Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, who wrote about India in the Caribbean, and the remarkable Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who lived in India for many years after her marriage. Then, fortunately, my reading took a more authentically Indian turn and I discovered the works of R.K. Narayan. I think, in fact, that I had read one of his books before the principal discovery — The Man-Eater of Malgudi was my first exposure to his writing, and although this book made an impression, it was not until a bit later that I found myself engrossed in the rest of his books. The effect, though, was profound, akin to my later discovery of the work of that sadly neglected English writer, Barbara Pym.

Now if I developed a taste for reading about India through the work of R.K. Narayan, what were his early influences? Narayan has left us a fascinating autobiography, My Days, which gives us an insight into his boyhood. He was, as you know, the son of a headmaster, and obviously in such a household he came into contact with a wide range of reading matter that arrived on his father’s desk for the school library. “My father,” he wrote, “ did not mind our taking away whatever we wanted to read — provided we put them back on his desk without spoiling them, as they had to be placed on the school’s reading room table on Monday morning. So our weekend reading was full and varied. We could dream over the advertisement pages in the Boy’s Own Paper or the Strand Magazine. Through the Strand, we made the acquaintance of all English writers: Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, W.W. Jacobs, Arnold Bennett, and every English fiction writer worth the name. ... Through Harper’s and the Atlantic we attained glimpses of the New World and its writers.”

From this it is clear that the influences which were playing a part in his literary development were many and varied — something which I think in due course showed up very clearly in the nature of his writing. R.K. Narayan enjoyed the great gift of being able to see the universal in one small slice of humanity — the occupants of a single town. How much of that gift came from his boyhood reading — from his voracious consumption of the literature of cultures in which he was at the same time both insider and outsider. The world of Wodehouse’s extraordinary country houses was very far from the world of his father’s school in Mysore, but it is this dissonance, surely, which gives the writer the insight he needs to describe the universal. For wherever we are, the small things of life are the same: the jealousies, the ambitions, the frustrations, the human striving.

And it is Narayan’s ability to capture human striving so perfectly and poignantly that I think has most deeply influenced me in my own novels. As a young writer, he of course knew what it was to strive after something and to find it seemingly unattainable. It was while he was still a student that Narayan purchased a copy of a book entitled How To Sell Your Manuscripts. He was not a particularly good student, possibly because he was too busy writing, but inspired by this book he sent his manuscripts off to London publishers, only to experience that rejection that almost all writers must face: the letters back saying that the publisher regrets that he cannot in the current climate, etc etc.

Narayan sent the manuscript of his first novel, Swami and Friends, to a series of London publishers, but to no avail. Then his first publication came — in the pages of the humorous magazine, Punch, no less — and it brought him the then handsome fee of six guineas. He now became a journalist but continued to send out manuscripts without success. The manuscript of Swami was still doing the rounds in London — still unsuccessfully — and Narayan wrote to a friend in London who was sending it out for him. If it came back again, he said, his friend should tie a heavy stone to it and throw it in the Thames. Fortunately, the friend did not take this advice, but continued to show it, eventually to Graham Greene. It sat on Greene’s desk for a while and then he read it and passed it on to a publisher with the recommendation that it should be published. That happened in 1935 and it was the launch of Narayan’s distinguished career as a novelist. In all he wrote fourteen books, each, in its way, a little gem.

The central themes that you find in a Narayan novel — the portrayal of the hero or heroine who strives to be something, perhaps unrealistically — is for me an immensely powerful theme, and one that is full of comic possibilities as well as great human grandeur. Life in this world is, for many, not easy: the barricades are not always in the right place, people do not always understand what it is that we really want, our abilities are not always as readily recognized as we would like them to be. But in spite of all the limitations that we have, we still have our dignity, which is so important to us. That is what Narayan teaches us — that the dignity of the small person, the apparently insignificant onlooker on the great dramas, is important. He helps us to sympathize and to understand. And he shows us, too, that in these small strivings of everyday life, there is the larger story of humanity’s potential for both kindness and unkindness.

One does not need a large canvas to portray all this. Remember Jane Austen, who famously said that she painted miniature pictures on tiny squares of ivory. She did. Nothing much happened to her characters — they led restricted lives in which the major question was often whether they would meet and marry a particular man. Yet these tiny squares of ivory are really great canvases that say a lot about what it is to be human. Similarly with Narayan’s novels, in the small events of their lives we see the big issues written large. And these issues are revealed in a clear narrative, in limpid prose — something that is not always evident today in contemporary novels. Narayan can ramble a bit, but he rambles clearly — if that is not a contradiction — and of course real life rarely goes from A to B without digression and excursus. In that respect, rambling may be considered a virtue from the social realism point of view.

When I wrote the first novel in my Botswana series of novels — The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency — although I may not have realized it then, I now acknowledge that I was heavily influenced by Narayan’s example. I proposed to write about a woman in a smallish town; I chose for her a friend and assistant who had strived very hard to get where she got in life; I chose to make Mma Makutsi inordinately proud of her performance in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College, where she achieved the hitherto-unheard-of mark of 97 per cent; I chose to make the society in which they lived an intimate one, in which reputation and status was important — all of these being typical features of the Narayan novels. Was I consciously imitating? No, I don’t think I was. The influence was, I think, more of that subconscious nature that I have alluded to earlier on. And so when a journalist interviewing me some years ago said, “Your novels remind me rather of the work of R.K. Narayan”, I felt a momentary surprise and asked, “But how do you know that?” — not realizing, perhaps, that this was not just a random, co-incidental insight on the journalist’s part, but something which was fairly obvious to anybody who knew both bodies of work.

What of Narayan’s reputation today? There are, of course, fads in the growth and decline of literary reputation; authors can be in favour one moment and then in the next, people may be heard saying, “Why on earth did anybody bother to read him or her?” Such is the fickleness of the public taste. I am not sure how extensively Narayan is read these days in the UK, for example, but I can say that when I mention him to even quite well-read friends, many of them confess that they have not read him. This upsets me every bit as much as when I hear that friends have not read Auden. The remedy, of course, is always at hand — an appropriate edition thrust into their hands with an earnest imprecation to read it as soon as possible. I hope, though, that there will be a revival of interest in Narayan’s novels in the United States. A couple of years ago, I was privileged to be invited to write an introduction to two new re-issues of omnibus editions of his novels, published in New York by Everyman’s Library. I was delighted to do this, and I have hopes that the inclusion of these books in a large and widely-circulated list in the US will introduce new readers to this very great writer.

If there has been a central theme to this lecture, it is this: that India has, through a number of writers writing in English since the late 1930s and up to the present, made an inordinately vital and significant contribution to the body of world literature written in English. I have tried to show, through an examination of my own experience and through an instance of literary influence, one writer upon another writer, how this affected my own work in a major way. In making this contribution to world literature, we outside India have been immensely enriched by the subtle, gorgeously human, and beautifully written prose which your writers have given us. Long may this process continue, and if Indian writers continue to win all the Booker prizes ad infinitum, then that will surely be richly deserved.

Alison, by Jack

A person's life in photographs.

GM crops and India's suicide belt

The region of Madhya Pradesh in India called Vidarbha is one of the hottest regions of the country. It is located almost in the centre of the subdontinent. It is also now called India's suicide belt. The reason is genetically modified, or GM crops. Monsanto, the US based supercorp which trades in seeds and agricultural products is using India as a a test ground for GM crops. These seeds are sold at much higher rates than traditional seeds. To make room for them, government seed banks and other sources of traditional seeds arebeing displaced. GM seeds require much more water than traditional varieties. In India, where electricity and water is not always guaranteed, GM crops fail. Leaving the farmers in terrible debt. At which point they commit suicide. As simple as that. Of course, if the crops succeed, then the farmers reap rich harvests. But it increasingly appears that our government has sold the poorest of the poor down the drain. Yet again. The truth of the matter is that Western corporations can afford to treat the rest of the world with such awful callousness only because they are always able to find brown/black people who will happily sell their own families away for a few dollars or pound sterling. It is these people whom we end up electing to positions of power who are, in truth responsible for ruining lives.

Read this article on the GM crop related suicides.

What is a PhD worth today?

This is a question I ask myself every so often. Good answers are not forthcoming. Let us take a short look at the context of this problem. In the India of today, certain jobs are highly paid: the software industry, banking/finance. One might say that the Indian economy has finally come of age. But the other side to this 'success' is that all other professions are being sidelined. To the extent that it is now increasingly difficult to the point to being impossible for, say a high school teacher to buy a flat in any major city. Forget houses, only the rich live in houses in urban India. Small businesses are being run into the ground by large conglomerates. In effect, much of our nation is being Walmart-ised. The other side of easy, but well paying jobs straight out of college is that the more 'staid' professions, such as 'proper' engineering; just does not have any takers. As a result, our industrial production is dropping in overall quality. And the diversion of trained minds to relatively well paying, but not intellectually demanding jobs (call centres, anyone) is in my opinion the equivalent of the nation shooting itself in the head. The price we will pay for adopting the worst of Western values without thought is that we risk becoming a client state for the powers that be. But coming to the initial topic, what is a PhD worth? State salaries are not too high for research staff. Industrial research is a new beast in India. But in the larger context discussed above, these two articles talk about miscalculations by policymakers and the larger malaise gripping the entire university system, although from the US perspective. Good reading.

1. Don't Become a Scientist!
2. Doc'd - economic disadvantages of graduate education

"It's not coincidental that 1928 was the last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the nation's income."

This essay from the Post talks about much of what is wrong with allowing wealth to flow upwards.

CLASSE TOUS RISQUES

CLASSE TOUS RISQUES: a French gangster flick about a man on the run with his two young children. The script is very competantly worked, very tautly strung, hardly a moment wasted. Lino Ventura plays the protagonist, intensely aware of the noose inexorably tightening around him. Jean Paul Belmondo is awesome as Stark, the only friend our hero has. Decent camera work, score more often silent than not. But the real winner is the script and the strong performances. One can see echoes of the performances in much later works from Miller's Crossing to Last Man Standing.

Gimme a drink now!!

Sweet and wonderful pikchures of animals drinking. Water.

Is global warming now irreversible?

Read this article.

The end is nigh for H1B visa holders (maybe)

A certain senator wants Microsoft to first cut H1B workers' jobs. This could be the beginning of a nasty trend that will hit us Indians where it will hurt the most. We have spent the better part of three decades training the world's largest white collar work-force, and done so largely at the expense of developing better industrial research. As a result we have pen pushers and coders, but no genuine 'products' in the sense that a Dell desktop is a product. These workers depend, and with them the Indian economy depends on the US economy, and the H1B visas are the umbilical cord. Times are bad indeed.

Indian Pharma companies flouting environmental laws?

This article talks about how Indian pharma companies apparently do not treat waste water from their plants leading to high levels of antibiotics in river water. This could lead to emergence of drug resistant strains of disease causing pathogens.

Slumdog Millionaire

Apparently won big at the SAG awards last night. Here is a rather negative review of this film. I tend to agree with the review for the most. What do you think?

That silly git, Ender

The theme of 'humanity is just at the threshold of turning into a spacefaring species when we encounter a malevolent species which just about wipes us into extinction, and then humanity unifies to fight them' has been well explored. Consider Starship Troopers and The Forever War. But Orson Card delivers a different version of this in Ender's Game. In this story, Ender is a six year old who is taken away to 'Battle School', an orbital where the smartest and most talented children are trained in strategy and whatnot. The pressure is turned on him the very first day, because as side conversations let us know, he is 'humanity's last hope'. His training becomes progressively more and more difficult and brutal, all in the hope of honing him as a master strategist where skill and ruthlessness are driven into his rather pathetically sensitive psyche.

Why I am not particularly impressed.... hmm, for all that the book talks about, there is little else from a 'superman complex' happening. The impression I get is that the author is one of those men who sat slack jawed after reading about the Riders of Rohan. Don't get me wrong here, nothing bad about it. But the point, of course is that there should be much more to the martial way then just this. Something approaching greatness was achieved by Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers where the philosophy and morality of arms is discussed at length. Heinlein has always been one of those smaller authors: neither as good at 'hard SF' as Clarke, and not as perceptive of society as Asimov. But he tried hard, and the niche that he carved out for himself was as a voice for the young America, the nation of colonists, for that was the image that he had of humanity's first fumbling attempts to the stars. But he transcends his technique in Starship Troopers where the whole book is essentially about the molding of a soldier's character.

The other great effort in this direction is The Forever War, written by Joe Haldemann. This was a riposte to Starship Troopers and has a proper hard-SF theme to it. The author manages to show the gradual alienation of the soldier from the society he is supposedly a centurian of when he returns from each operation. Future shock is what happens when the world has moved on, and you have not. This is a basic theme underlying the novel.

Ender's Game is rather puerile in comparison. It smacks of furious and impotent dreams of being 'the best of the best of the best' being translated to words. And Ender's objective, puportedly is to fight out the Battle of the Jutlands in space. At the end of the day, a rather tired work.

The bloke who invented the donner kabab is dead...

Read the full article here. My own introduction to donner kababs came along when I didn't know that they were named so. We called them Shawarma kababs in India, and this place was near Shivajinagar, en route to M G Road. But seriously, I became a fan of this awesome wrap at Hamburg. There is this entire subculture of Turkish influence in Germany, and it manifests itself atleast, on the surface as some awesome food. Enter donner kababs.

And a rather interesting take on men/wimmen dynamics

As explained in this viddy...

Female orgasms directly correlated to partner's bank balance?

Apparently... read on. Hmmm... I guess that explains how the world functions.

HMS Ulysses

To start off on a suitably irreverent note, my father and I often joked that Maclean would write about bitter conditions from the comfort of his home, perhaps with a shot of Seagram's by his side and shudder at the thought of being there. And write on. He had a few favourite phrases which appeared in many of his war novels: the "Stygian blackness", "Spartan simplicity", "the screaming wind like a thousand banshees", and of course, my personal favourite phrase "stuttering staccato machine gun fire".

This is not intended to take anything away from one of the best writers who have concentrated their efforts on WWII. HMS Ulysses is his first, and perhaps his greatest work (comparable only to the famous Guns of Navarone). Maclean's protagonists have always been ordinary, decent men who have been thrust into extraordinary circumstances where they are driven beyond any human capacity for absorbing punishment. But still, they strive, they fight, and usually they die. In this respect, the other great war novel which comes to mind is Battle Cry by Leon Uris.Maclean's characters are not always as fleshed out as Uris', but that is because they show themselves to be what they are through their actions and not necessarily because the author chooses to talk about their thoughts.

Now, about this book. Before we talk about this book, we will touch upon the topic of Arctic convoys. 1941 was the year of Pearl harbour and Operation Barbarossa. The US had been drawn into the war and while one might say today that the outcome was thus automatically decided, it did not seem that way in the months of late 1941-early 1942. The fate of the European theatre was to be decided in one colossal action: the battle of Stalingrad. For this, the Allies shored up the USSR effort with supplies, which came from the East Coast of the US and from Scapa Flow in Scotland and ended up at Murmansk and Archangel. A total of 78 convoys totalling 1400 ships delivered supplied to the USSR over the war. Of these ships, 85 merchantmen and 16 Royal Navy warships were lost. These convoys were subject to Luftwaffe attacks from Norwegian bases. Long range recon flights carried out by FW Condors would pinpoint the location, course and strength of a convoy. Waves of Heinkel torpedo bombers and Stuka dive bombers would then arrive. A constant source of fear was the Tirpitz and her consorts, holed up at Alten Fjord in Norway. They were a "fleet in being" which always had major elements of the Royal Navy Home Fleet tied up at Scapa. The horrifying sinking of the Royal Navy's pride, the HMS Hood at the hands of the Bismarck after a single, savage salvo continued to affect RN strategic thinking till late in the war. As a result, capital ships were rarely risked in the cold waters of the North Sea. Thus, German commerce raiders such the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst enjoyed a high degree of immunity while operating against convoys.

But the greatest danger came from the Uboats. These submarines operated in 'wolf packs' with stealth, cunning and great courage. Admiral Karl Doenitz, the C-in-C of the Kreigsmarine's Uboat fleet had indeed built up a terrifyingly effective force. It was the combination of the elements and the imminent threat of death flying in on swift wings, or rising from the deep and announcing itself by the telltale trail of an 18-in torpedo or the distant muzzle flashes of naval rifles which made the Arctic convoys what they were. And still, the sailors fought on. Their courage was equaled only by that of their adversaries: of the 40,000 sailors in the Uboat fleet, 28,000 never came home.

HMS Ulysses was the fictional first ship of the Dido class: a 5500 tonne light cruiser, heavily armed with highly sensitive radar and extremely fast. She was the flagship of the 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron. But two years on Arctic duty had driven her crew to the breaking point and beyond. The book begins in the aftermath of a mutiny at Scapa, brutally quelled by marines from the battleship Duke of Cumberland. Ulysses is given the opportunity to redeem herself by going out to escort a convoy to Murmansk. Her crew, haggard and stretched thin, malnourished, sleep deprived and mostly suffering from the initial stages of TB cannot, should not be expected to keep on. But their loyalty to Vallery, their captain keeps them going for this one last mission.

The convoy is plagued with troubles from the beginning: some of the escorts suffer mechanical trouble and have to head back. And then they learn that they are the trap for the Tirpitz, and capital ships of the RN are waiting for the battleship to slip her moorings. The Ulysses and her convoy are the bait. As they cross the Arctic circle, the monster strikes. The wind sweeping off the Greenland cap, hammers them with an almost human ferocity. Two of the escort carriers are damaged to the point where they have to turn back. As the escort force is reduced to the bare minimum, a Hipper class German heavy cruiser turns up. The next two days are spent in a terrifying game of cat and mouse with the cruiser. Then, just as the convoy appears to have given the cruiser the slip, the Uboat wolf-packs appear. One by one, the merchantmen and their escorts are taken apart by the Germans. The submarine and airborne attacks are pressed home with brutal efficiency and unrelenting determination. As the flagship, Ulysses absorbs an unbelievable amount of punishment, but somehow keeps going. Her crew is the same, they have been driven beyond the point of any human tolerance, they have seen death in the face, and they have been too cold, too numb, too indifferent to even register fear.

With each page of the book, you enter the private hell of Leading Torpedo Operator Ralston who has lost his family just before sailing from Scapa Flow, you walk with Surgeon Commander Brooks as he tends to the wounded, when sometimes all there is to do is close their eyes and mutter a few of prayer. And then you shoulder the responsibilities of Captain Vallery who pushes his emaciated wreck of a TB ridden body to one more act of courage, for the crew has gone to the point where King, God and Country mean nothing.. it is merely their personal loyalty to their Captain that holds them together. And the, the denoument. Ulysses' moment of truth is her last action with the Hipper class cruiser. In the hands of a lesser author, this would be a mere tale of courage at sea. Maclean has managed to weave together a story of extraordinary texture which will stay with you long after you have finished turning the last page.

Pics from last birthday

It started off as an innocuous evening with C and me watching a random movie, and then people started streaming in. Turned out that my roomie, the resourceful Moitra had pulled off a surprise birthday party.

There was cake, and junta who wanted to help smear it all over muh face. A good time was had by all.

2008 Darwin awards

Which, as you know are given to people who have done the gene pool a favour by removing themselves from it, usually by acts of egregious stupidity. Getting killed in some random war does not count. Unless of course you decided to saw the casing off an unexploded bomb and that was what punched your ticket. Read on for the 2008 winners and laugh. Or cry.

Anonymous basturde proposes to Tajel

And it is not me.