Apart from the ambiguity, this post is to redirect readers in search of stories of my running to the new running blog at dailyruns.wordpress.com. Thanks.
Remembering Basheer Bagh
15, October 2008 at 1:20 pm (Ordinary Life)
We have been trying to remember the name of the area in Hyderabad which is specially known for Pearls shops and also falls on the way to Ohri’s if you’re coming from HCU to the city. The original reason for trying to confirm whether the palatial house that my friends Rekha & Giri live there (where we had a great impromptu party in January 2002 during the Architecture of Language conference at then CIEFL) is the same ancestral home of Rufi. well, the fact of the matter was that we couldn’t remember the name of the area at all although been there several times and must have crossed even more times.
There were actually three things that we were not being able to recollect, the name of the MTNL guy from Shaharanpur who was very helpful (although not very useful) during the times when our broadband connection refused to work after we moved house (and he later (June ‘08) informed that our connection has got ‘dimaq’), the name of the (Turkish) movie by Nuri Ceylan that we fell in love with and have seen it many times and have a personal DVD — this in connection with Pamuk being Aditi’s favourite author, now that Mohan Maharshi is putting up ‘Istambul’ for a week at IGNCA — and of course the name of the area in Hyderabad.
This morning while cutting out interesting news and analysis from that great newspaper The Hindu of the last week, I came across a book review, which I hadn’t read earlier, on The Women of Mahabharata. This reminded me of the discussion that we had last night on evidence of homosexuality in the epics and older texts in India. There was a difference of opinion on the issue, Basan insisting on an affirmative and me on the negative with regards to the textual ‘evidence’ — there was no denying of the possibility of homosexuality existing in the ancient Indian society — a separate issue. Here we were talking of the textual evidence or may be even sculptural evidence.
This book review on the Women of Mahabharata reminded me of that debate and also the possibility that we might have forgotten to think up of Iravati Karve’s book which Basan read in April. To clarify further, I was thinking whether it is the case that she forgot to garner evidence in support of her theory in terms of Karve’s famous book.
Then something funny happened, I thought of the possibility that although it was easy to remember Karve’s name just now when I was actually trying to recall her name, if it was the case that I had to recall her name, I am sure the name would have eluded me, at least for a while.
At that very moment something even funnier happened, I remembered Basheer Bagh!
Time is Running
28, September 2008 at 2:07 am (Ordinary Life)
Tags: reading
Out of my door and the windows in this spacious flat where sunlight generously pours in from all four sides. I am struggling to cope with this constant catching up. A friend had a status line in FB “I want the world to stop for a week so that I can catch up”, oh how true! I wish. I’ve now come to the conclusion that there’s no way I am going to be able to read all the books that I’ve amassed, in this lifetime; an old flame had asked several years ago whether I will bequeath my collection (estate!) to her. I might have to think on that line now. I am surrounded by half-, quarter-, un-, read books strewn all around me in in this flat breathing of life and filled with brilliant end-September Delhi sunshine. My head is bursting with ideas from Philosophy (of Nancy, on Forgiveness, Moral Philosophy in particular), Feminism, Critical Social Theory, Syntax, Postcolonial Studies, Historiography, and of course, the ever-present ideas from/ on postmodernism — or, may be, this IS postmodernism. Their overlap, I don’t mind, but incompletness bothers me to no end, not thinking through ideas is not thinking about them. My mind is overcrowded with voices, situations, fantasies, and mostly, conversations. These days, I am convinced that this state of my mind is making me forget, very specifically, just the previous thing. So if I have to do, let’s say, the things p, q, s, t and n, I will always forget ‘t’ i.e., only the immediately previous task slips out of my mind, of course they all have to be sufficiently close for this effect to take place. For example, if I have: go to the living room, pick up the keys, switch off the fan, I will go to the living room and switch off the fan and after 30 seconds (when I am returning to the bedroom) I will remember t. I think this is because of my mind being overcrowded and also because I tend to, more and more so, do too many things in too little a time. I think my consciousness has registered the fact that there’s not enough time to accomplish everything I had set out to, and therefore there’s a hurry to DO. My colleagues and students always wondered how I could pack in so much within the same time that everyone gets — little did they realise that I was doing that at the cost of my health, sometime I’d use the bed for only 4 hours a day continuously for 15 days. Of course, I had to pay a price and now, when I thought, I’ve learnt my lesson, I’ve actually gone beyond overwork — I am trying to achieve something which is humanly not possible. The constant feeling that pushes me towards this unknown dangerous edge is the ever-present feeling of time running out.
The Mallard Incident
13, September 2008 at 3:11 am (Philosophy)
This is from part of my reading on Revenge (McCullogh 2008):
Early on the morning of October, 26, 2001, twenty-five-year old Chante
Mallard was driving home along Interstate 820, just southeast of Fort
Worth. It had been a long night of partying, and she was drunk and
high and ready to be back in her own house. Fatigue, combined with the
many substances in her bloodstream — alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy — had
impaired her judgment and slowed her reaction time, so there was no
way she could have reacted quickly enough to prevent what happened
next. As she rounded the horseshoe-shaped curve to merge onto Route
287, Mallard drove her car straight into a man who had been walking
along the dark highway. Gregory Biggs, an out-of-work bricklayer, was
only thirty-seven-years old. Greg was catapulted onto the hood of
Mallard’s car. His head and upper body went crashing through the
windshield until they came to rest on the passenger side floorboard.
His legs remained trapped inside the windshield. With all of the drugs
and the noise and the broken glass, Mallard was so disoriented at
first that she didn’t even know that a human being was stuck in her
windshield. When she realized what had happened, she took the Village
Creek exit off of Route 287 and stopped the car. She got out and went
around to try and help, but as soon as she touched Greg’s leg, she
panicked. In her drug-addled state, she couldn’t figure out what to do
next. So with Greg still immobilized in the windshield, she drove the
final mile back to her house, pulled into the garage, and closed the
garage door behind her. Mallard let Greg bleed to death right there in
the garage. Over and over, Greg begged Mallard to help him, but
Mallard, a nurse’s aide, insisted that there was nothing she could do
for him. So she left him to die. Medical examiners would later testify
that Greg almost certainly would have survived the crash had he
received prompt medical attention. Later that morning, Mallard
entertained a boyfriend inside the house while the car and Greg’s
lifeless body sat in her garage. When darkness fell, Mallard and two
friends dumped the body in a nearby park. An informant told the police
that she joked about the incident later. It was several months before
police received the tip that would lead them to Mallard. After her
arrest, Mallard was tried and convicted of murder. She was sentenced
to fifty years in prison. At her sentencing hearing, Greg’s son
Brandon had the opportunity to make a victim impact statement. Instead
of using this opportunity to request the harshest possible sentence,
Brandon said to the court and to Mallard’s family, “There’s no winners
in a case like this. Just as we all lost Greg, you all will be losing
your daughter.” Later, Brandon would go on to say, “I still want to
extend my forgiveness to Chante Mallard and let her know that the
Mallard family is in my prayers.”
On Death
1, August 2008 at 2:19 am (Philosophy)
Tags: Adam Phillips, death, Freud, love, protectionsim, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, war
Yet another issue that is raised (by Adam Phillips) is Freud’s insistence on the theme of death. Phillips talks about the ‘racket of protectionism that always protects us from thinking or talking about the inevitable fact of death. Freud thought of death at the time of WW I. I think the issue appeals more to a psychoanalyst like Phillips as it’s also about activism or taking a position in terms of action, and about psychotherapy. From the perspective of ‘life as a therapy’ we should think and talk about death so that we can cope with it better in our own lives. Protectionism actually leaves us unprotected. A life without loss is not worth living; this is said in the following fashion. Life without loss is an immoral life. Freud asserts that life is worth living only if we risk it (as in a war or love, according to Freud). We can have life because we can live it in a way that endangers it. But how can we endanger life since the culture that surrounds us, rather, engulfs us, is all about preserving life rather than endangering life? Even the love that surrounds us in all its commercial, consumable glory, is all about ‘preserving’ a relation, in engendering life rather than endangering life.
On Flirting
30, July 2008 at 2:20 am (Ordinary Life, Philosophy)
Tags: Adam Phillips, flirt, flirtation, formalism, life, postmodernism, postmodernist, psychoanalysis, structure, subversion
The child grows to be an adult with the same fears, and that’s how psychoanalysis, for a major part, relies on tracing adults’ “problems” to be same as childhood anxieties. However, Adam Phillips (AP) questions this — it needn’t be so, in fact, it shouldn’t be so. So, flirting, for example, is something that establishes relationships and expands one’s horizon but is not something derived from the child. AP says that for the child, there’s one mother and one father but for an adult there may be more women or men. He questions the whole idea of committment in this connection — the child within theory demands committment (= attachment) to a relationship — a bit like Oedipus Complex.
To me, this brings to mind the question of formalism — whether or not we start out with a formal structure and derive/ extend our life with that basic structure. The two issues are not exactly parallel (and therefore, more interesting) since it’s not the case that there exists a simplistic equation of formal = child within theory and flirting = outside formalism. Rather, the worry is more like whether or not can the extended structure retain the basic properties of the basic formal structure. If the answer is ‘yes’, then it can be argued (contra AP) that flirtation is still within the standard psychoanalytic model (the child within theory). If the answer is ‘no’, then it leads us into a lot of interesting postmodern concerns. One way to look at that possibility is to say that since the extension (=flirting) subverts the basic formal structure, we need to practice it more (the activism aspect of the postmodern). On the other hand, this can be questioned by a true postmodernist in the following manner: Why is subversion required in the first place if there is no structure to subvert? That is, a true postmodernist will deny the existence of what I’ve calling the ‘basic formal structure’. After all, structure is needed to understand or to analyse; it then assumes that (i) there’s something which can be analysed, and (ii) there’s someone who can analyse, the latter, setting up a power position immediately for the analyst.
A postmodernist doesn’t stop at this critique, s/he searches for an alternative: what if life isn’t about analysis or understanding? The interesting part of this objective, from the true postmodernist’s perspective, however, is that it denies that anything, in principle, could potentially subvert. That is, there is no activism possible from this position. This would simply imply that whether flirtation is an extension (that, derived from the basic structure) or a subversion, is a non-issue. Then what’s the big deal about flirtation? It’s like any other thing which fits or doesn’t into the mess (because it’s unstructured) that is life
Also see the following:
Stephen Hawkins wants to leave Britain
26, July 2008 at 2:31 am (Academics)
Tags: American, Britain, clause-internal, comps, English, Germany, Indian, Linguistic Inquiry, linguistics, Netherlands, New York, New York University, NLLT, PhD, Sino-American, Stephen Hawkins, UCL, USA
Stephen Hawkins wants to quit Britain if the country continues to be apathetic towards higher research or research in general. The question is, where will he then go? For an average English person (though SH is in no way an “average” person), crossing the channel is a dream – it’s only us, Indian, who think that the English actually must be hating the English speakers across the so-called ‘pond’ for whatever (their uncouthness, mainly) – Mr Blair was thus not an exception but in fact, the rule. Gone are those days (of Churchill) when the Americans were considered to be a bunch of upstarts. They in fact were, but so what Mr English? Also gone are the days when the vulgarity of the average nouveau-rich America was genuinely hated in Britain. Now it is the Brits who are only too willing to follow the Americans in e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
So it’s really a dream for the average English person to cross the channel and settle somewhere in America with a job. After my PhD from the UK in late 90s, I was interviewed for a job in the New York University over the telephone. One of the questions which I still remember being asked was, how would I deal with students who express doubts about the subject. I also remember telling them that I’d in fact tell the students what the reality was, in terms of jobs, career etc., but will also tell them about the pleasures of doing Linguistics along with the pains. There was silence, I remember. Of course, I didn’t get the job – though needn’t be for this particular answer – but certainly, I feel, it had a role to play. It was therefore surprising for me to come to know that, years later, in fact, this year, one of the interviewers still remembers me and the interview. But of course, she is a Hungarian and probably had lent a sympathetic ear to me. In general, it was believed at that time that the average American College is suspicious of the British education system; for example, one of the brightest guys in Linguistics in the job market around that time – who also had a paper in the famed Linguistic Inquiry and NLLT – failed to get selected for a position a the Harvard (he was selected as a young lecturer at UCL the same year when I was about to complete my PhD).
Anyhow, the point I am trying to make is the, sort of, role-reversal that is so clearly visible in the conduct of each country. In fact, I’d think that the Americans have been rather polite not to blatantly ignore opinions expressed by British statesmen which, in truth, they don’t much care about. They would take statements by the Chinese statesmen much more seriously as lot is at stake in Sino-American relation. The Brits even know how spineless their leaders have been in the recent past but they don’t seem to mind much. With such a background, it’s not at all surprising that America would seem like a dreamland for the average Briton.
Stephen Hawkins, though not an average Briton, still, probably has the USA in his minds. And why not? For higher research, it is a dreamland for the many, the research scene in the USA is of a very high standard. No doubts about it. In fact, it is only expected. Pure research requires money and America has plenty of it. Otherwise, who is going to be interested, for example, in the clause-internal complementizers in Bangla — just to take a random example from Syntax (Linguistics)? Well, the Germans were. I did exactly that research sitting on the 9th floor of a modern building in the former East Germany. And you could do it equally well in the Netherlands as well, I am sure. Not so in the Latinic cultures like the French and the Italians where the questions similar to that of Britain (and India) will be raised with regards to the viability and adaptability (for the greater good) of the research being done. And rightly so. So, what is it then? It doesn’t seem to be money that facilitates research. It must be the way of thinking in the culture, in the society at large, they values ascribed to higher research. And this is I where, I think, higher research in the USA and either in the Germany/ NL differs. In the latter, research, first of all, has a very long tradition – it has been almost the way of life in the academics. Secondly, research has not been directed towards applicability but rather as a form of furtherment of knowledge in its highest form. If it then also fulfils applicability, well and good, but the goal of research should never be the applicability of the idea in the society at large, the most crucial research of the past centuries would then reduce to nothing. So, it’s the attitude and the way of thinking that ails the society (as in the UK and India) from shirking away from state-sponsored higher research. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen Hawkins does in fact cross the pond soon.
Americans learning Foreign Languages
14, July 2008 at 1:47 am (Academics, Reactions)
Tags: American, Arabic, bilingual, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, monolingual, multilingual, Obama, Swahili
Obama wants American kids to learn foreign languages, he feels that Americans in general are disadvantaged by their lack of command over foreign languages compared to the Europeans. He is dead right, and he shouldn’t compare Americans just with Europeans but with the rest of the world. There is no nation so deprived that its citizens are handicapped by a pathetic monolinguality. The rich array of evidence in favour of the connection between bi/multilinguality and better performance in Mathematics and Science in Schools, has, as usual, fallen on deaf American ears all these years. In fact, there’s a common belief that Americans are so deaf (literally and metaphorically) that they can’t hear the difference in the other tongues. That is, they are unable to perceive the difference between American English and any other language, so much so, that it hinders their ability to learn any other language. Well, this is a bit of exaggeration, but if truth be told, attitude is one hell of a crucial factor in determining who is going to be able to learn a language with ease and who is going to falter and then finally give up. This is where, in my estimate, American fall awfully short. Their self-perceived economic supremacy blinds them to take note of the other – this has been shown time and again in various domains by various authors and commentators – and this problematic attitude blinds them from learning someone else’s language; she thinks that everyone should understand and learn American. Well, the ground realities are rather different. While the world around her is getting smarter by the minute by being bi/multilingual, the poor American is left behind in darkness of her monolingual existence. If Obama can now offer some ray of light into that darkness, each American should grab them by both hands.
I am also of the opinion that the suggestion to learn another Germanic or Romance language is not a sound one. In fact, the “proximity” of one’s mother tongue to a target tongue sometime prevents efficient acquisition. To the untrained and therefore rusted “language acquisition device” meant for second language learning, exercising newer and distant synaptic connections may reap richer harvest in terms of her ability to train the LAD efficiently to acquire a distant new language. I’d therefore think that they’d do well to learn Arabic or Hungarian or Korean or Swahili rather than German, French or Hindi. I am serious!
Reading Guattari
12, July 2008 at 2:21 pm (Academics, Philosophy)
Tags: Bakhtin, conversation, Guattari, Kristeva, reporting, teaching
“The idea is to offer/ create/ have choice”.
I have done it my teaching and Kristeva has expounded it in her depiction of the Rites of passage artists’ intentions.
Reporting is the least powerful form of writing. When I say I went to (and not want to) Z and did Y, I’m less impressionable than when I say I think SK is the best author in Bengali.
So, although the ideal would be to have the descendence of silence as the least powerful form of communication, I’m willing to grant reporting as a form in conversation or in an intentionally “confused” (or “dubitative”) form of teaching (or learning experience).
Someone poses the question: why if text is the essence of human science (Bakhtin) should we strive for silence.
For me, offering the podium to your interlocutor is equally powerful as expressing opinions. Saying: What do you think is same as I think blah …..
So, for me, the only form of expression that’s ok for me is reportage.
