Once upon a summer, 1985

There were three buses from Nungambakkam to Mount Road: 25, 25B and 17c. On every day of the week in the summer of 1985 (except on Mondays), I would be standing at the Nungambakkam Police Station bus stand, at about a quarter past ten. The journey from there to the TVS stop wasn't long, but buses weren't always reliable, and it would be a little before eleven that I would find myself waiting, along with several others, on the stairs of the British Council, waiting for the library to open.

 

This was a Madras summer, and it was a physical thing. The air was like hot syrup, and your shirt would stick to your back as you waited, and when the doors finally opened, you would walk into the blessed coolness of air-conditioning. For me, that summer, it was heaven.

 

Library membership cost Rs 80  a year, and you could borrow up to four books at a time. Cards were issued by a slender, distinguished-looking woman with short, iron-grey hair with improbably beautiful diction.

 

There were books I borrowed from there, of course. There were Wodehouses,  pretty much the entire set - but you could seldom find them on the shelves, as people would ransack the carts the library staff used to take returns to their proper locations. So you had to reserve them, which meant looking up the card catalogue, finding the proper number and filling out a form, and later you would get a postcard when the books were available, telling you to pick them up within so many days. I remember making a reservation for Bill the Conqueror, and being delighted when the postcard finally came - and being ultimately disappointed, as the book wasn't as good as many of Plum's best. There were the Orwells, and for some reason, I never read his novels. I consumed his essays, though, fascinated, even then, by the depth of his perception and the clarity of his language and worldview.

 

But it wasn't for those books that I was at the library for. It was for the part of the library which housed a few TV sets, and you could get one of the staff to load up a David Attenborough documentary, and marvel at the glories of the planet. Or it could be an episode of Fawlty Towers, or some other show, and you'd realize that you were laughing only when you caught some other member's disapproving stare.

 

But most of all, I lived for the reference section.

 

It took up almost a third of the library. There were comfortable chairs all around, and the space was punctuated by shelves. There were magazines - music, mechanics, automobiles and current affairs. There were week old English newspapers that some older members would read, religiously. There were encyclopaediae on a variety of topics. And there were the film guides.

 

 I hadn't been very much into film at that point.  After all, the only major English films that came to Madras were James Bond thrillers, a year after release in the West. This was the time when the biggest grossing film in India - for several years - had been MacKenna's Gold. I had watched a few Bond films - the ones that had come to the theatres, and loved them. And of course, I'd watched Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

I think that I pulled out a film guide to see if there were other films she had acted in.  This being the British Council, you wouldn't find Maltin's guide - which was available in the bookshops. But I'm pretty sure that what I initially looked through was some run of the mill film guide.

 

I'm not sure when I first came across Leslie Halliwell's guide. But it was unlike any of the others. Dense, without pictures - imagine a film guide without a single still, it seemed heavy going.  And there was the severity of judgment. Pages and pages of films without a star rating. I looked up Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Two stars.

Two Stars.

It was one of the  greatest movies I'd seen, and all it got was two stars?

I looked at the Bonds.

The Spy Who Loved Me?  No stars.

What???

So who was this guy? Some arty type who only rated Oscar movies?

I checked Gandhi - which had won the Oscar recently, to front page coverage in every Indian newspaper.

Three stars.

Not expecting very much, I looked up From Russia, with Love.

Three stars, the same as Gandhi.

Description: "Arrant nonsense with tongue in cheek, on a big budget"

 

Every day after that, except on Mondays, when the library was closed, you'd find me there, deep in Halliwell's Film Guide, 4th edition, and later the 5th. Sometimes, someone would be sitting in my favourite chair, and I would glare and glare, and reclaim it at the first opportunity. Somedays, I would go with a notebook, and make list of films that I would see, when I got the chance.

 

And when I was sated with reading about old films, and Hollywood's golden age, I would leaf through magazines. Or watch a show.

 

And soon, it would be evening, and I would reluctantly close the guide, and head back to the bus stop, wondering if I would ever be able to see all the films that I wanted to. And as the bus made its way to Nungambakkam, I would slowly emerge from a world black and white and colour, where Errol Flynn would battle Basil Rathbone on the stairs of Nottingham castle and Bogey would have one more drink and Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell would scheme and manipulate each other and every one else, into a world of public exams and IIT preparation and all the rest, far away though it seemed at the time.

Guilty Pleasures: James Hilton

The first James Hilton I read was Lost Horizon. It was one of those books that I had heard about, but I don't know where I heard about it. I found it in Eswari Lending Library, that Aladdin's cave of books in Lloyd's Road, back in the early 80s. I remember the cover too - lurid yellow, with an extremely Oriental woman and and leering man in the background - this one.

I remember liking it very much. The only other book by Hilton in the library was Goodbye Mr Chips, which I devoured. After all, I had just passed the age of reading about boarding school antics, from Malory Towers to Greyfriars and found the lifestyle fascinating (though a common threat for bad behaviour from my mother was that she would put me in a hostel if I didn't behave any better).
I don't quite remember when I first read Random Harvest, but I'm quite sure this was after I became interested in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Halliwell had given it three stars, and the movie itself was hokum, but sincerely done, with a magnificent cast.

---

It was only later that I really read it, and I found I enjoyed it very much.
Charles Rainier is an industrialist and a Conservative MP, to all intents and purposes, a very successful man, with a lovely wife who is also an accomplished hostess. But there's something that he's missing, an emptiness that he has been trying to fill in his life.
We learn that there is a gap in his memory, a period of three years he remembers nothing about, three years that took place after he was wounded in the great war, and then he woke up in 1920, recovering from an automobile accident, with no memory of what happened to him, from 1917 to the moment he regains consciousness from the accident.
The story is about how he tries to to recover those memories, but its also about the period between the two world wars. Chronologically, the story begins with Armistice Day, 1917, and ends on September 1, 1939, and the picture it draws of England between the wars is fascinating.
Rainier is upper middle-class, and after rejoining his large family, decides to go to Cambridge - something he thoroughly enjoys, but he gives it up to take control of the family businesses.
It's a portrayal of the English upper classes that's a great deal more affectionate than, say Waugh, even though there are characters who could move seamlessly between the two worlds.

Jill could afford once more her cruises and flirtations, with no handicaps to the latter except advancing middle age and none to the former save an increasing difficulty in finding new places to cruise to. Julia and her husband lived in Cheltenham, playing golf and breeding Sealyhams; George and Vera preferred town life and had taken a newly built maisonnette in Hampstead. Julian was at Cannes, doing nothing in particular with his usual slightly sinister elegance; once or twice a year he turned up in London, took Charles for lunch to the Reform Club, and worked off a few well-polished epigrams. Bridget had married an officer in an Irish regiment and lived in a suburb of Belfast. She had had one child, a boy, and was expecting another. With George's girl and Julia's boy and girl, this made a problematical five as against seven of the previous generation, unless (as Chet put it) Charles hurried up. They were not, however, at all anxious for Charles to hurry up; and as both Lydia and Jill were past the age when any amount of hurry might be expected to yield result, and as Vera was sickly and Julia (so she boasted) had nothing to do with her husband any more, the ratio really depended on Bridget—plus, of course, an outside chance from Charles. Nobody even considered Julian in such a connection.

Hilton's prose is simple - and surprisingly economical. It doesn't thrust itself forward, but with a couple of sentences, he establishes the characters of Charles' family, individually and as a unit.

There's also the Al Stewart aspect - who I kept thinking of as I read the novel. Many of Stewart's songs - Post World War II Blues, A League of Notions, Trains - all take you through periods of history, painting pictures with a few words, and deceptively muzak-sounding music, until you realize that there's a considerable amount of artistry behind it. It's much the same way with Hilton. And this is about an England between 1917 and 1939.  The very next paragraph to the one above switches from the personal to the political.

Much more, though, had happened between 1921 and 1924. The ancient Irish problem had apparently been settled; a conference at Washington had arranged limitation of naval armaments between England, Japan, France, and the United States; someone had almost climbed Everest; the German mark had collapsed and French troops had entered the Ruhr; Mussolini was rebuilding Italy and had already bombarded Corfu; there had been an earthquake in Japan, there had almost been another war with Turkey, there was still a war in Morocco, and there was going to be an exhibition at Wembley.

And through it all is Charles Rainier, a decent man, but also, like so many of Hilton's heroes, curiously passive. Not to suggest that he isn't capable of action, quite the contrary, but it is disinterested action - a very Bhagavad Gita kind of action. He's as much observer as doer.
Hilton was a bestselling author in his time, and many of his books were filmed. And one of the greatest advantages he had were the actors who portrayed his heroes were definitive examples of decent, gentle Englishmen - Robert Donat in Knight without Armour and Goodbye Mr Chips, and Ronald Colman in Lost Horizon and Harvest. And their performances do so much to cement the idea of the decency of heroes.

Donat and Dietrich in Knight Without Armour

Colman as Rainier and Garson as Paula Ridgeway in Random Harvest

Nineteen twenty-five was another improving year, the year of Locarno, the false dawn. It was a year perhaps typical of the twenties in its wishful optimism backed by no growth of overtaking realism; another sixpence off the income tax, another attempt to harness a vague shape of things to come with the even vaguer shapes of things that had been. For the public would not yet look squarely into that evil face (publishers were still refusing "war books") and few also were those who feared the spectre might return. The England hoped for by the majority of Englishmen was a harking back to certain frugalities of the past (lower and lower income tax, smaller and smaller government expenditure) in order to enjoy more and more the pleasures of the present; the Europe they dreamed of was a continent in which everybody placidly "saw reason," while cultivating summer schools, youth hostels, and peasant-costume festivals in the best tradition of Hampstead Garden Suburb; in exchange for which the City would make loans, trade would thus be encouraged, and taxes fall still further. Mixed up with this almost mystic materialism was the eager, frightened idealism of the Labour Party (both the eagerness and the fright came to a head a year later, in the General Strike); the spread of the belief that the League of Nations never would be much good but was probably better than nothing, a belief that effectively converted Geneva into a bore and anyone who talked too much about it into a nuisance. Meanwhile a vast and paralysing absence of hostility gripped Englishmen from top to bottom of the social scale, not a toleration on principle but a muteness through indifference; they were not AGAINST the League of Nations, they were not AGAINST Russia, they were not AGAINST disarmament, or the Treaty of Versailles, or the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, or the working classes, or Mussolini—who had, after all, made the Italian trains run on time. "

---

I've called Hilton a "guilty pleasure", and I have often wondered why. I've read worse writers with pleasure and have made no bones about it. I sincerely believe that guilty pleasures are signs of snobbery (not that I'm immune to snobbery myself, but I try to guard against it myself ). But sometimes I feel embarassed that I like Hilton. Maybe it's because of the exaltation of a certain kind of Englishman, a certain kind of Englishness - which as an Indian, I instinctively distrust.
Consider this bit.

The very absence of all these things was English, Rainier said—something offhand but good-humoured, free but obedient, careless but never heartless.
"But tell that," he added, "to the Indians in Amritsar, to the Chinese who read the notice in a Shanghai park, 'No Dogs or Chinese Allowed,' to the tribesmen in Irak, to the peasant in County Cork, to the..." But then he laughed. "God, how we're hated! It isn't so much because we really deserve it. Even at the bottom of the charge-sheet I could quote Santayana's remark that the world never had sweeter masters. SWEET—a curious adjective —and yet there IS a sweetness in the English character, something that's almost perfect when it's just ripe—like an apple out of an English orchard. No, we're not hated altogether by logic. It's more because the world is TIRED of us—BORED with us—sickened by a taste that to some already seems oversweet and hypocritical, to others sour and stale. I suppose the world grew tired of the Romans like that, till at last the barbarians were excused for barbarism more readily than the Caesars were forgiven for being tough. There come such moments in the lives of nations, as of persons, when they just can't do anything right, and the world turns on them with the awful ferocity of a first-night audience rejecting, not so much a play it doesn't want, as a playwright it doesn't want any more... But wait till they've experienced the supplanters—if we are supplanted. A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history..."

Naturally, as someone from one of England's former colonies, this irritates me.
But then, the India I live is the India of Delhi in 1984, of Gujarat in 2002 and Delhi in 2020.

"But wait till they've experienced the supplanters—if we are supplanted. A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history..."

And I wonder.

The Nameless King

As part of my "self-isolation", I've been doing three things: gaming, reading and writing; in that order. The ratio would probably be 80:15:5.
And over the course of four days last week, I've played a certain section of a game over and over and over.
The game is Dark Souls III. If you're into games at all, you know what I'm talking about. If you aren't, well, it's a fiendishly hard game. But, it's also fair. It requires, atleast in the initial playthroughs, a lot of caution, and a lot of dying.
 

This is a Filk song for the game. And it captures it quite well

Souls games begin with you waking up undead, and navigating a short tutorial section, before you face a boss enemy - to whom you will die a few times, before making your way to the game's hub area.
From there, you go on, looking for the MacGuffins - bells to ring, items to collect, and at the end of each area is a boss - usually a punishingly hard boss. And you die, and you run the "gauntlet of misery" back to the boss, until you manage to survive the encounter.

I spent four days - around twenty hours - just fighting one of them.

In the game's mythos, he is the exiled son of the thunderbolt wielding prime deity. This world survives because of the first flame, which provides heat and light, and keeps darkness at bay. And in the beginning, Gwynn, the God of Thunder defeated the primordial dragons, but his eldest son, and the Gods' greatest warrior, betrayed them, and joined the dragons instead. He was banished, and all records of his existence were destroyed.
He is the guy I spent all those hours fighting.
The run-up to the fight is epic in itself. The area is called Archdragon Peak, and you battle your way through vicious serpent-men who can destroy you in a couple of hits. You run past one dragon that lands in your path, weaving through ruins filled with enemies, dodging gusts of fire when you get out in the open, until you get to a point where you can strike at the dragon's weak spot. Then you toil up a mountain side face off against another dragon and another horde on enemies, until you find a safe spot next to a giant bell.
You walk up to the bell, and pull a lever. The bell tolls, and thunderclouds gather. Gather may be too mild a word - they boil around you. One moment, its a clear sunny day, the next, your standing on a vast cloud, and in the distance, a speck gets bigger and bigger - until you see that its a massive dragon, with a man perched on it.

Then the music starts, as the dragon swoops towards you. And its rider lifts up a massive spear, crackling with lightning.

Progress in most games - be they racing or sports or FPSs - is all about pattern recognition, and how quickly you respond. It all comes down to seeing cues, and pressing the right buttons.
The build up to the boss fight - or level - is designed to teach you what you need - which cues to look for: which moves are one shots; which cues presage the beginning of a combination of obstacles/threats; which moves require instinctive responses; which cues need just that bit of delay before you respond, and so on.
But what makes the King so hard is that he has a huge variety of cues - in this case attacks. Most of them are telegraphed, but figuring out what each cue means, and how to respond to it - decisions on whether to dive away or sidestep, to dive once or multiple times, whether to move towards him or away, linearly or diagonally - have to be made instinctively. And add to this the fact that you lose sight of him when some of his rushing attacks move him behind you, and you're frantically turning around to figure out where he is, while he's lining up a devastating strike.

Dark Souls is known for its punishing bosses - a tradition that goes back to its first edition, where players encountered the formidable duo of Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough.  And the Nameless King is probably the hardest boss in the series - which includes the three Souls Games, Bloodborne and Sekiro.  One of the most popular comments in the video of the Ornstein and Smough fight goes something like this: "So this is how it sounds beyond 10 seconds".

Fighting the Nameless King, I felt that comment.

The first time I went in the dragon wrecked me. The the king pounded me to a pulp with his great spear. Then the dragon burnt me to a crisp.

I tried again.
I died in 10 seconds.
Again.
15 seconds.
Again.
45 seconds, and almost killed the dragon.
Again.
Dead in 5 seconds.

This went on for an hour, before I killed the dragon.

Then this happened.

 
The first time wasn't too bad. I was able to keep myself alive, and waiting for openings, would risk the odd attack. I kept chipping away at his health bar, and got it halfway down.

And then I got greedy.

And he curb-stomped me.

It took me another day for me to beat the first portion - the dragon part consistently. Even then, one wrong move, one bad reposition, and I would die.

I started getting to the second phase more consistently, but I never did as well as I did the first time around.

I think the first time, I was more open-minded - more willing to play it safe because I didn't know his patterns, more alert because I didn't know what to expect.

Later, it was all "Oh shit, he's going to do this deadly attack and I should be really far away", panicked moves, and then he would switch up his attack and eviscerate me.

Over and over again.

For three days.

I looked at videos of the battle on the internet. I tried ranged attacks. I tried tanking. The end result was the same.

"YOU DIED"

Finally, I posted a plea on reddit. One of the suggestions was that I rebuild my character for this fight.

I did that - it was a completely new playstyle, one that I wasn't accustomed to, but I felt a lot sturdier. I had been, to use TVTropes jargon, a fragile speedster/glass cannon. Now I was the mighty glacier.

It was over in 3 minutes.

When the king finally collapsed, I didn't feel much. I thought to myself, "That's done".

It was only later, when I thought back about the boss battle, that a feeling of relief seeped through me.

Now I could get on with my life.

And maybe next time, I would defeat the king as a fragile speedster. That would be the real test.

But for the whole day and the next, I really felt like this.

My Ulysses Read - Proteus (1)

My Ulysses Read - 3

I finished Proteus, the third chapter in Ulysses a week ago. And read it again.
The first time, I read it mostly online, at The Joyce Project. The second time, it was the book version.
There's a world of difference. The online version is hyperlinked (in fact, its one of those charmingly old-fashioned sites, relying on plain html - the kind you hardly see any more) - and is extremely distracting, because you tend to go down - not a rabbit hole, but an absolute warren.
(Obligatory XKCD)

Reading the chapter in the book is very different - because you go through the narrative, pausing only to underline and mark stuff to look up later.

Nebeneinander Nacheinander

I'm wondering why I'm doing this. I am a literary snob, but an inverse snob. Given a choice between Edgar Wallace and David Foster Wallace, I will always go for the Feathered Serpents, the cabal of Just Men, and Mr Reeder with his rolled up umbrella. I would rather read Agatha Christie than Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Sanders than DH Lawrence, PG Wodehouse and Dashiell Hammett over everybody else.

So why am I trying to read Joyce? He's famously literary, loved by critics, very much part of the canon. And a modernist. And I wonder - is it some kind of snobbery that makes me want to read it?

I wasn't so close-minded before. When I was in college, I read reasonably omnivorously. Reveled in Stephen King and Tolkien and Conan Doyle, but also read the Castle and the Trial. We read Chaim Potok and Bernard Malamud and Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway (I can still hear Macho repeating the name 'Potok' with childish glee). I remember getting into TS Eliot after listening to Highway 61 Revisited, and from there, via Christopher Ricks to Howl and Moloch.

Somehow - maybe as a result of the serious readers I met in later in real life - I closed myself off. I stuck to pulp and crime, genre fiction and comic books - a luxury for someone growing up in pre-liberalization India, where the superhero stories you read came in comics published by Chandamama.

As I wrote earlier, maybe reading Joyce would be like playing Dark Souls, where the sheer brutality of the gameplay kept you from the payoffs of mastering enemies and their moves, figuring out attack patterns of the bosses - to that final feeling of achievement you got when Gwynn (or Gehrman in Bloodborne) finally collapses and the achievement dings on the top of your screen.

This diffidence I feel about Ulysses, this fear of my own pretentiousness, also makes me question my own enjoyment of the book. It took me a lot of listening to classical music before finding pieces that I liked - the choral was probably the easiest to like, but going from there to the Goldberg variations or the Nocturnes or Mahler's 9th took me a long time - and these are pieces generally understood to be much more accessible than - oh I don't know - a Stravinsky. And when I'm reading, something at the back of my mind wonders "Am I trying to acquire a taste?"

And I suppose the answer is - "If you're enjoying it, go for it".

And I am enjoying it. Not in the way I enjoy Hammett, where the terse prose rushes me through tales of greed and violence; not in the way I enjoy Pratchett, where he makes me grin - just before he makes me think; not in the way I enjoy Wodehouse, where laughter is the effect of sheer, effortless mastery of the language. Reading Joyce (with references) is like reading a solved cryptic puzzle, and you see the kind of effort that went in only when you understand how the clues fit in.

Nebeneinander Nacheinander

I'll probably write more about Proteus, but at the end of it - I came away with an impression of having read something beautiful.  And the words Nebeneinander Nacheinander are a part of that. The words are a reference to Gotthold Lessing's Laocoon: On the Limits of Painting and Poetry. "[Lessing’s Laokoon distinguishes] between poetry, which deals with objects one after another in time (nacheinander…), and sculpture and painting, which deal with objects next to one another in space (nebeneinander)"

Space and time.
Close up and long shot
Cross-section and time series
Stop and go
Balance sheet and P&L

Nebeneinander and Nacheinander.
It's become a mindworm, a thought-equivalent of a earworm, and now I'm trying, like Stephen, to shoehorn every duality into these two words.

The other thing about Proteus, especially with Stephen on the beach,  is that this is so close to my experiences of being stoned. There's an appreciation of the world around, thoughts like an explosion of stars in the firmament of the mind - but one following the other. (Nebeneinander, Nacheinander). There's the sudden paranoia at the sudden appearance of the dog - the live one - the distant interest in its activities, and the spiraling back to dead mother, unknown woman and daydream of desire, a flash to the sensuous, of breeze on the face, remembered quotations (Full fathom five thy father lies - which sent me on to Eliot who used "Those are pearls that were his eyes, and from there to Hitchcock, whose Rich and Strange I saw in the British Council oh so long ago)

Since this isn't a book in the conventional sense - I don't think I will go to the next chapter just yet.
I'll read Proteus again.

Fields of Gold

There are five railway stations in the Kolar Gold Fields: Marikuppam, Champion, Oorgaum, Coromandel and BEML Nagar. If you include the trains from nearest big junction, Bangarpet, there are 25 trains to the state capital every day. The first train starts well before dawn – but is crowded, crowded with all the young people of Kolar commuting to Bengaluru to work.

On the face of it, KGF looks like any other small town in India – but then you notice that there are very few cars on the roads. It’s all either two-wheelers or autos. The people on the roads are mostly students – or women with children. “What do you expect? All our young people are in Bangalore, working as housemaids or security guards. There are no jobs here,” says G Jayakumar, the coordinator of the BGML Employees, Supervisors and Officers United Forum.

A Town of Memories

Sixteen years ago, last week, the company at the heart of India’s most famous – and fabled - company town shut down. Bharat Gold Mines Limited, the public sector enterprise that operated and managed the Kolar Gold Fields, was one of the most visible casualties of liberalization, when the recommendation made by the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction to wind down the company was accepted by the central government. When the company shut down, it had 3,100 workers, down from 35,000 employees during its heyday in the 1960s.

“The population of KGF is around 2.4 lakh. That’s more than that of Kolar, the district capital. Even though KGF is not even a taluk, we have a separate superintendent of police and a separate district surgeon,” says R Vikramadithan, former chairman of the KGF Urban Development Authority. “This was one of the first places in India to get electricity – in 1902, from Shivasamudram, before even Bengaluru. KGF had the largest hospital in Old Mysore, the BGML Hospital, a three hundred bed hospital, built way back in 1880. Now, we can’t even compete with Kuppam, which Chandrababu Naidu is developing at a record pace,” he says.

Ghosts of the Past

Scattered around KGF are the shafts – marked by rusted metal platforms, around two storeys high. They still bear British names – Bullen, Champion, Edgar and so on. But with the Brits long gone, the names have become Indianized.  Hancock’s shaft is now ‘Uncox’s’, Rodgers camp is now Rajesh camp.

Next to the Hancock’s shaft is a building that looks like a cathedral – it’s actually housing for an aircompresser, feeding power to the cart that took the miners down – 3,200 feet below the surface. The cart is rusted solid now, and the sheds nearby are falling apart. “This is where the agents would sit. This is where the explosives were the explosives were stored. The mines clerk would have a key, the officer would have another. Both of them had to unlock the stores at the same time to access the gelatine and the ANFO,” says 64-year old Francis Peter.

Peter used to be a detective, guarding against gold thieves among the miners. He and his crew would navigate the miles of tunnels under the surface, with just a single torch to guide them through the darkness. The idea was to conduct surprise checks on the miners – who had their own ways of communicating to each other that checks were on the way. But now, those gold thefts seem minor. “They looted this place – those so-called-officers who were supposed to be looking out for us,” he says. “Everything that could be moved, they stole, from the machinery to the copper wire that connected the compressor to the shafts.” He spits in disgust.

Gayatri Chandrashekar, the author of Grit and Gold, a history of KGF, says “The very people who were supposed to guard the resources of BGML were the criminals,” she says.   

The next generation     

There are around 140 students in the Government Higher Primary School in lower Maskam. “These are children from the poorest families. We have a few students from the local remand home for children as well,” says Nagaraja Rao, the school’s principal. For the children here, the mines are irrelevant, the stuff of stories their grandparents tell. They aren’t living in the past, but immediately, vitally, in the present.  Take 14 year-old Clinton (It seems like the Big Dog has taken over from JFK as the US president people name their kids after these days). He’s tall, dark, and taciturn. He wants to quit school when he’s 16 and go to Bengaluru and become a dancer and dance teacher. He’s already discussed this and got the approval of his father, John, an auto driver. There are the brothers Ameenu, Siddique, and Saleem. Their father Fairoz is also an auto driver. Siddique wants to become a car mechanic when he grows up. When Ameenu, the eldest, prompts him, asking if he doesn’t mean a mechanical engineer, Siddique shakes his head. Not an engineer, but a car mechanic. He’s quite emphatic. Saleem, the youngest, has the grandest plans. He wants to be a collector.  As for Ameenu, he wants to be an engineer. “He’s smart enough, he can do it if he studies,” says his teacher Varalakshmi, smiling with pride. There’s Charulatha, a gangling girl of 12. Her father works in a local garment store. She wants to become a cop when she grows up.

There’s Ramesha. He ran away from home when he was nine, unable to take the constant beatings his parents dealt out. Now, he’s at the remand home, where he’s happier. He doesn’t ever want to go back home. There’s little Vidya, nine years old, very shy, and heartbreakingly pretty, with her left hand horrifically withered and burnt after an accident with hot tar. She’s another remand school resident as well. Her parents left her there, unable to take care of her. Like Ramesha, she’s happier there. They give her breakfast and dinner there, and the school provides her lunch. She gets 3 sets of school uniform clothes. Life is better at the remand home, she says.

Despite the poverty, despite the hardships, these children are bright and inquisitive. They live in a world without Instagram and Snapchat, in a world where books and play still matter. They aren’t blasé or jaded and retain the sense of wonder that’s one of the most magical things about childhood. “They’re all good kids,” says Indumathi, another teacher. “Of them, we hope that at least 50% will go on to college. We can only help them up 4:30 pm, while they’re here in school. After that, when they go home, they’re on their own,” she says.

Open and shut

Every once in a while, news of new developments in the myriad of court cases surrounding BGML sweeps through KGF.  Or it’s talks of the mines being reopened. But this week, there’s been a significant development. “We have now got the penal interest on the delayed gratuity payments for the miners,” says Jayakumar.

According to Jayakumar, its more viable to get the gold from the so-called “tailings”, the cyanide salt dumps that dot the landscape around KGF.  “We are ready to do what is needful to revive mining in this area. But there are vested interests who have been working against the workers – while pretending to speak for them,” he says.

Jayakumar has been fighting for the miners in the courts, as well as representing their issues to the government for years now. For him, the next target is getting compensation for the miners’ lung infections. The miners call it silicosis, and it’s a result of inhaling the crystalline dust from the mines.  “1,500 people have died as a result of BGML’s neglect,” he says. Now we are going to the Supreme Court. Prashant Bhushan is representing us.”

But as far as the revival of mining is concerned, KGF seems to be the ball in a ping-pong game between the Centre and the state. “The Central Government has said that it is OK with the idea of the Karnataka government taking over and running these mines. But the Karnataka government does not want to take on the 1,700 crores of BGML’s liabilities,” says Jayakumar.

A long, slow decline

Over the past seven decades, the story of Kolar has been one of departures. First, after Independence, the British officers left. “The Company now began to entrust more responsibilities to the Anglo-Indians. Other educated Indian Officers and Agents joined the Mining Company at this stage and they took over many Administrative and Managerial posts when the European exodus began,” says Bridget White Kumar, a long-time Kolar resident who now lives in Bengaluru. But the Anglo Indians too found themselves considering other options. “Towards the beginning of the 1960’s till the end of the 70’s there was a mass exodus of the community from KGF to England, Australia, America and Canada,” she says.

In 1956, John Taylor and Sons, the company that was instrumental to the development of the Kolar Gold Fields handed over charge to the State of Mysore. Fourteen years later, in April 1970, the firm closed down.  

Today, most of the BGML officers have gone, too. A few remain, dreaming dreams of reopened mines and gold from sand. The old workers remain, too, hoping for compensation and payments that may never come. The younger generation has abandoned hope of work in KGF, preferring gruelling commutes on crowded trains to Bengaluru every day. And with talk of the privatization of BGML, the last big employer in the area, it looks like Kolar is set for another exodus. 

Reading Ulysses - Nestor

My Ulysses Read - 2

Ah Nestor. The old windbag. Full of unheeded advice and stories of past glories. General tool, who is respectfully listened to and ignored, the general who needs to be rescued from the battlefield. (At least, that's Nestor in the Iliad. In the Odyssey, Nestor is a different person entirely. Courteous, devout and a good host, who takes in Mentor and Telemachus, and points them to the direction of Menelaus.
The parallel of Mr Deasy is more in keeping with the Nestor of the Iliad than of the Odyssey.  Deasy is a Tory, an old man who rattles on about Ireland's history and writes letters to the papers about Foot and Mouth disease. He pays Stephen, but rubs in the fact that Stephen owes money to lots of people.
The theme for this chapter is "catechism" according to Gilbert, and "Wisdom of the ancients" according to Linati.

Here are the schema entries:
Gilbert

Title	Scene	Hour	Organ	Colour	Symbol	Art	Technic
Nestor	The School	10am	-	Brown	Horse	History	Catechism (personal)

Linati

Nestor

9 — 10 a.m.

Brown

Telemachus Nestor Pisistratus Helen

History

The wisdom of the ancients

And the chapter begins with a catechism - a Q & A session, call & response, call it what you will. And its history, about Tarentum, and Pyrrhus, the man who gave us the Pyrrhic victory. I wonder if that's supposed to mean something - in the context of the Irish struggle against Britain, or in a more personal context - that every victory we win is never worth the cost of the battle?

"Thought is the thought of thought".

OK. What does that mean? It's not like a "Rose is a rose is a rose", it's something that sounds good, but again, very "pale parabola of joy"-ish. But it can lead to thought being the enemy of action, another misquoted line - but one which came much later.

I kind of get Stephen here, looking at a bunch of rich kids, their futures already made because of their parents, while he grapples with the absence of his mother. I get the routine of unprepared lessons, of a job indifferently done. 

And I get Mr Deasy - there are so many Deasys in my own family - or atleast there were. Dead now, most of them. Conservatives, staggeringly hypocritical, parsimonious, and proud of it. Full of advice and opinion, and yes, catechisms, in their own way.

— Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

— Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.

— He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth?

The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

— That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

— Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

— I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way.

The first thing I wanted to know was: "Who was the French Celt?" But unfortunately, that seems to be a red herring.  Scottish author, John Wilson, writing as "Christopher North" in Blackwood's Magazine in 1829, is sometimes credited as originating the usage. But Wikipedia has a whole page on the possible origins of this phrase, and the various empire it referred to, dating all the way back to the Bible.

The other thing that struck me was the "Iago" quote. My grandfather was full of quotes from Shakespeare - not from any reading of the plays, but half remembered scraps from a book of quotations.

But this made me wonder, yet again, about context. Is a quote automatically suspect - and untrue - because it came from Iago? That in context, it was malicious? What about the meaning you take away from it? Does a quote become less true if someone repellent said it.

There's this bit, which could easily make it to a thousand greeting card platitudes, inspirational Twitter and political campaigns:

"And I can fight only for something that I love, love only what I respect, and respect only what I at least know"

It sounds perfectly sensible and logical. Does it become automatically suspect because it was said by Adolf Hitler?

Anyway, that's another track altogether.

Returning to Nestor and the schema, Sargent, the ugly, mathematically-challenged student, I suppose, is Pisistratus (though he isn't Nestor's son).  Who then is Helen?
But overall, an interesting chapter. There's a ton of references I don't get, but I like this kind of reading. Kind of takes me back to the days - pre-internet days - when I discovered TS Eliot, and was trying to figure out the lines, using the annotations.

Reading Ulysses - Telemachus

My Ulysses Read – 1
I've always wanted to read Ulysses. It's a strange thing. On the face of it, it's the kind of book that I should despise. It's been called a masterpiece, in so many ways, by so many people. It's supposed to be dense, and a difficult read. It's supposed to packed with allusions and references that even literary scholars have difficulty getting. And, most importantly, not much happens, there are no  murders, no violence, and the sec that shocked people in the 1920s just seems quaint in the context of fauxcest and bukkakes peddled by millions of porn sites online.
Then there's the cultishness of Joyce worship. That, by itself, is not a positive or negative – Casablanca is recognized as the classic it is because it was a cult favourite in Harvard in the 60s. Cult followings are responsible for so many long-lived cultural products – whether its literature or film or music. But the Joyce cult, with it's instagrammable Bloomsday outings in Dublin, the regular posts that appear on social media – all seem to showcase at a sense of achievement: “I read one of the most difficult novels written in the 20th century, and I loved it!”  It does, in a way, seem snobbish.
But because I like to read about books, and about authors, as much as I like to read themselves, I know a little about Ulysses. I know that Joyce wrote keys to understanding the book for friends -  the so-called Linati and Gilbert schemas, with each chapter allocated its own colour, title, symbol, organ (!) and relevant artform.
(I wonder if Joyce was just taking the piss here)
I've read the Odyssey, of course. Or atleast, I've read an abridged version when I was young, and I read Butler's translation when I was older. I know that there are parallels between the Odyssey and Ulysses, a correspondence between Joyce's chapters and the books that make up Homer's epic – but I thought it was a one-to-one thing, 24 chapters in Joyce, one for each hour of the day, each linked to one of the 24 books that make up the Odyssey, but I was mistaken. There are only 18 chapters in Joyce's book.
I wonder why I am doing this. I probably will have nothing new to say. What I will want to say has probably been said better and more succinctly by more intelligent people. The only thing here is my own ego - that despite everything, I will have something to say. And whatever else, putting your thoughts down in words also has the effect of making things clearer in your mind.
So here goes. The first chapter.

Telemachus

The first book of Homer's Odyssey doesn't have a title, but is mostly about Telemachus losing his patience with Penelope's suitors. Telemachus is still young – a teen? - and the suitors brush him off and party on his livestock and pressure his mother to marry one of them. So a lot of it is exposition – in fact – the Odyssey opens with Zeus telling Athena that yes, it's high time Odysseus returned home, and Athena going down to Ithaca to keep Telemachus' spirits up.

“So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him into a large cave and wanted to marry him. But as years went by, there came a time when the gods settled that he should go back to Ithaca; even then, however, when he was among his own people, his troubles were not yet over; nevertheless all the gods had now begun to pity him except Neptune, who still persecuted him without ceasing and would not let him get home.”

Now, this is the first chapter as per the Linati schema.

Title	Time	Colour	People	Science / Art	Meaning
Telemachus	8 — 9 a.m.	Gold / white	Telemachus Mentor Antinous Suitors Penelope	Theology	Dispossessed son in contest

Title	Technic	Organ	Symbols
Telemachus	Dialogue for three and four, narration, soliloquy	-	Hamlet, Ireland, Stephen

And this is the Gilbert schema for the first chapter.

Title	Scene	Hour	Organ	Colour	Symbol	Art	Technic
Telemachus	The Tower	8am	-	White / gold	Heir	Theology	Narrative (young)

Now, the time part of it is quite obvious, as is the place. The colour - well there are references to Buck Mulligan's teeth - white and gold, as well as Stephen's thought "Chrysostomos".  The dispossessed son is Stephen - whose mother has just died (But do we know anything about Mulligan's mother? Or Haines'?). Stephen is the heir - and the symbol? Which Stephen? Daedalus? That seems too obvious. St Stephen - the first martyr of Christianity? Hamlet and Ireland, I get, the latter especially when Stephen talks about his two masters.
As for the people, Stephen is Telemachus, fine. Mentor, atleast in the second chapter of the Odyssey, is Athena, but what's the correlation? Given Stephen's dislike of Mulligan, it kind of makes sense to think of him as Antinous, and Haines as another unwelcome guest, the suitor. But the only other woman mentioned in the chapter is the woman who serves them, and is she Penelope? Or is she Athena? I suppose I'm being oversimplistic to expect a one-to-one correspondence between the schema and the chapter, but it is puzzling,
Is this normal?

Reading Ulysses

I've always wanted to read Ulysses. It's a strange thing. On the face of it, it's the kind of book that I should despise. It's been called a masterpiece, in so many ways, by so many people. It's supposed to be dense, and a difficult read. It's supposed to packed with allusions and references that even literary scholars have difficulty getting. And, most importantly, not much happens, there are no  murders, no violence, and the sec that shocked people in the 1920s just seems quaint in the context of fauxcest and bukkakes peddled by millions of porn sites online.
Then there's the cultishness of Joyce worship. That, by itself, is not a positive or negative – Casablanca is recognized as the classic it is because it was a cult favourite in Harvard in the 60s. Cult followings are responsible for so many long-lived cultural products – whether its literature or film or music. But the Joyce cult, with it's instagrammable Bloomsday outings in Dublin, the regular posts that appear on social media – all seem to showcase at a sense of achievement: “I read one of the most difficult novels written in the 20th century, and I loved it!”  It does, in a way, seem snobbish.
But because I like to read about books, and about authors, as much as I like to read themselves, I know a little about Ulysses. I know that Joyce wrote keys to understanding the book for friends -  the so-called Linati and Gilbert schemas, with each chapter allocated its own colour, title, symbol, organ (!) and relevant artform.
(I wonder if Joyce was just taking the piss here)
I've read the Odyssey, of course. Or atleast, I've read an abridged version when I was young, and I read Butler's translation when I was older. I know that there are parallels between the Odyssey and Ulysses, a correspondence between Joyce's chapters and the books that make up Homer's epic – but I thought it was a one-to-one thing, 24 chapters in Joyce, one for each hour of the day, each linked to one of the 24 books that make up the Odyssey, but I was mistaken. There are only 18 chapters in Joyce's book.
But, with all this, there is also the certainty that I'm overthinking this.
So anyway, this was my resolution for 2020, something that I wrote about here, and I have taken my first tentative steps towards the omphalos of Telemachus.

The Frog Hunters

Dr. Sathyabama Das Biju leans near a tree by a small stream in the Kerala
forests. It is afternoon, but the trees provide shade and cooling.  A small
group of students and scientists wade in, looking for frogs.

The stream is a rushing torrent, and its bed is soft sand and slippery
stones. Here and there are rocks, black and wet in the spray. These rocks
host a number of small frogs. “Micri!” cries one of the students and there
is a huddle. Cameras are whipped out and conversations stop as focuses are
adjusted, ending with a series of clicks as the creatures are photographed
from a variety of angles.

“Micri” turns out to be student shorthand for Micrixalus, sometimes called
torrent frogs because they inhabit fast moving streams. Dr. K.V.Gururaja
scoops up a specimen. He gently pulls out a hind limb to display bright
white webbing between the toes. “This is a male”, he says. “The webbing is
used for foot flagging, a mating display. These frogs use their call to
attract the attention of the females, and then stretch a leg to display
these flashes of white, to bring the females to them”. Dr. Gururaja is a
scientist with Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and
Urban Planning at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He has
identified two new species of frogs in the last decade and has led several
expeditions in the north Karnataka area of the Western Ghats.

 “Interest in Indian amphibians was at a low for most of the last century,
until Dr. Biju came along”, says Gururaja. The last organized major studies
of amphibians, especially frogs were conducted in the late 1920s and the
1930s, by the legendary C.R.Narayanan Rao. With the exception of a few
papers by Dr. Humayun Abdulali research during the intervening years was
close to nonexistent. Dr. Biju changed everything. He is one of the worlds
foremost scientists in the area of amphibian taxonomy - the identification,
description, and naming of amphibians, and has done more than anyone in the
last several decades to bring the cause of the Indian amphibian to the
public.

It is late in the evening when the teams move on to Bonakkad, a small
settlement up in the hills. There is a TV crew present, but the journey has
taken too long for effective shooting. Despite its isolation, the place is
far from silent. There is a steady background drone of crickets.  Cicadas
call, starting slowly and peaking at shrill crescendos. But none of this
seems as exciting as the occasional clicking sound that comes from bushes
overlooking the road. The team members disperse in different directions,
looking for specimens. Sonali, one of the students points to a particularly
dense bush. “There’s one there – a *philautus”* she says.

But there are no *Philauti* today, though there are several lizards and
skinks.

“That wasn’t really a *Philautus*,” grins Dr. Biju.  “It’s probably a *
pseudophilautus*, a species that originated in Sri Lanka. All it takes is a
single gravid female to cross over the straits – and the freedom to flourish
in a new habitat”.

Its night, the best time for frog frolics. The camera crew is taking pains
to set the stage for some natural shooting. Dr. Biju introduces Mallan, his
occasional assistant in Kerala. “You may think that we scientists are good
at capturing specimens, but I can tell you this. We are nothing compared to
the local people. Without Mallan, half my research would not exist.”  Mallan
is lean and lungi clad and moves and talks with economy. He is dispatched to
find some good specimens and returns before anyone realizes he has left.
With him is a *Rhacoporicus Malabaricus*, a brilliant emerald green frog
with watermelon red webbing. It’s also known as the Malabar Flying Frog
because of its ability to glide up to 115 times its length.

The TV crew is initially ecstatic and the sleepy frog is placed on a
carefully selected stem.  The frog doesn’t seem to mind, but it is not
interested in giving a good show. It tries to go back to sleep, ignoring the
glare of the lights. The crew film it, but something is missing.  The
cameraman decides he wants a shot of the frogs webbed feet. One of the
students teases out a hind limb, but the frog is having none of it. It
immediately pulls its feet back the moment it is released. The cameraman
gives up after a few attempts. He decides to film it from underneath. With
some ceremony, a brown paper parcel is brought up to the crew. They unwrap
it to extract a pane of clear glass. The frog is placed on top, the camera
moves in below. But Malabaricus stays straitlaced, and keeps its legs firmly
together. The crew decide that they’ve got what they want and leave. The
scientists and students move on to the edge of another stream where Mallan
has constructed a makeshift tent.  A series of headlights bob through jungle
night, past early elephant warning systems made of bamboo poles strung
across the trail, festooned with bottles and tins, designed to clatter when
touched.

The number of people is greater than anticipated and the tent has to be
enlarged. Mallan and another local man work on it. Dr. Biju tries to offer
some suggestions, but is met by a stream of vituperation from the other
villager.  Biju flees, saying “It’s a good thing that most people here don’t
know Malayalam. It would never do for my students to know what this fellow
just called me”. They are clearly old friends.

There are some clouds and a light drizzle, but not enough to affect the
campfire. Mallan places a large aluminium pot on it, and soon there is
tapioca stew garnished with pickle handed out to the campers.

The TV crew return in the morning. They hope to get some footage of
Caecilians, an amphibian order that resembles earthworms. The group moves to
the Bon Accord Tea Estate on top of a hill, where a dig is being organized.
Varad Giri, Curator at the Bombay Natural History Society is overseeing the
dig.  The diggers unearth three writhing purple specimens. “Gegeneophis
Ramaswamii”, says Varad.  The crew films them wriggling in the presenter’s
hand, as she makes a short speech on the importance of Caecilians in soil
turnover. Another group of diggers have found an egg clutch, with miniatures
wriggling in their translucent white shells. The TV crew is happy.

The students have been sent to Ponmudi, on the Tamil Nadu side of the
border. “Ponmudi is where I started” says Biju. “I trained as a botanist,
and birdwatching was my hobby. It was on these birdwatching tours that I
discovered the beauty of frogs. I took a set of photographs of some
specimens and sent them to some local experts for identification. I wasn’t
very happy with some of the answers I got , so I wrote to Robert Inger, one
of the legendary figures in amphibian studies. His reply was one of the
biggest encouragements I have ever had. I still treasure the letter he sent
and that was the beginning of my love affair with frogs. ”

There is a Caecilian cornucopia near Mallan’s home, and the TV crew want a
short interview with him. Everyone is thirsty and Mallan brings coconut
water. The presenter tries to get him to stay, but he vanishes, reappearing
with bamboo shoots with which he fashions organic straws for the coconuts.
The crew decide to interview Dr. Don Church, the President of Global
Wildlife, a conservation group that supports Dr. Biju.

Near a rubber grove, one of Biju’s students is preparing a stage for
photographing two specimens captured the previous day.  Massive cameras are
extracted from tripods and set up as a Micrixalus is taken out of a small
ziplock plastic bag. A quiet  and unassuming man helps Biju set up the
camera and brings a huge leaf for providing the background. It turns out
that this is K.Jayaram, one of the pioneers of wildlife photography in India
and a man who has two species named after him.

The Micrixalus is a translucent chocolate with a thick black stripe on each
side. The day’s captivity has made him docile, and he consents to being
petted and posed without a croak of protest. Meanwhile the camera crew have
cornered Mallan for an interview in a rubber grove. Dr. Biju goes to
interpret, while one of his students continues the photography.

Its late evening when the group returns to Tiruvanandapuram. The camera crew
are off to their hotel and everyone else repairs to one of Dr. Biju’s
friends, Dr. K.V.Srinivasan. “K.V.S is one of my oldest friends and he is
one of the most intelligent men I have ever met” says Biju. “If I get to
name another species, I will name it after him”. Biju, Church and he are
discussing Biju’s next effort, a book on the lost amphibians of India, a
year long search that is expected to come to an end in September with a
spate of announcements and papers. K.V.S is the perfect host, keeping plates
and glasses filled, dispensing advise, refreshments and conversation in his
soft voice, while his eyes seem to twinkle at the humourous side of
everything.

“I would like the Systematics lab to become a subdepartment at the
University”, Dr Biju says. “A world class center for amphibian research. I
can get some of the best teachers in the world as visiting faculty. It would
offer a Masters degree, because I need a certain level of maturity in my
students. The first year will be a solid grounding in Systematics and
Taxonomy, teaching students how to do effective field work, and instill
scientific rigor in their thinking. It doesn’t matter where you publish, but
anything that you publish must be subject to stringent peer review. Only
then will you really be able to learn. Then maybe an institute of amphibian
studies…” He thinks about it for a minute, and then smiles. “Then I would
get no time to do the work I love , I wont be able to go out into the field
and look for my beloved frogs”. He waves his hands as his castle in the air
dissipates into a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Humboldt's Gift

I just finished reading Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Bellow is not the kind of author I would reach for, and he's the kind of author you would know about, maybe read a review of one of his books - maybe know a few details that would help you with a pub quiz - that kind of thing.I still don't know why I picked up Humboldt's Gift. Maybe it was the cover of the edition I found, tucked away in one of the shelves in Blossoms, reminiscent of the bestsellers of the 70s and 80s - Irving Wallace, old Harold Robbins editions before they became standardized with covers of attractive women. Plus there was this bit on the cover: “#1 bestseller”, while the back cover told me that the book had been “6 months on the New York Times bestseller list”.

It begins with the narrator Charles Citrine, now a fit, middle-aged man, taking a bus from the Midwest to New York's Greenwich Village to meet a poet who had just written an acclaimed book of poetry. From there, the narrative loops and whorls around – to Humboldt's squalid death in a cheap hotel, through Citrine's interactions with minor mobster, his ongoing divorce case with a venomous wife, his abject passion for a voluptuous(that word seems so dated, but I can't think of anything that fits better) woman named Renata and his worries with money. But it keeps returning to certain themes – Humboldt's fall and the role of poetry in America, and anthroposophy.I had to look up anthroposophy – and also Rudolf Steiner, who is mentioned several times during the course of the book, and frankly, it seems like a lot of ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. It's not that I consider mysticism ridiculous – I am, after all, a Hindu, and believe in the mystic experience as transformative, but anthroposophy just sounds silly to me. And if I want Western takes on mysticism, I prefer Hesse.Of course, how you respond to books is as much a function of where you find yourself in life, as much as the content of the book. Maybe I would have been more receptive to anthroposophy when I was a college student, but then I was able to find profundity in TSKV Iyer's textbook on circuit theory because I was stoned out of my mind most of the time.Citrine himself, I found boring. Quite appropriately – because boredom is a big deal to him. His opus was supposed to do to to boredom what Marx had done to capitalism or Malthus had done for population. He is self absorbed, led by his dick, passive – a bystander, but unattractively so. People have called the book funny, but looking at Citrine, its more about ridiculousness, in terms of the things that happen to him. He's like a punching bag – his beloved Mercedes is trashed by baseball bat wielding goons, he's taken for a hitman when Cantabile threatens a lawyer, he's left looking after his beloved Renata's son while she is enjoying herself with her undertaker boyfriend.Given that Citrine is supposed to be Bellow himself, it's an incredible act of self mockery. But there also seems to be genuine rage in the depiction of his divorce. Humboldt doesn't fare much better – abuser, drunkard, and eaten up by envy. In fact, the only people who seem to have their shit together are George Swiebel, Citrine's childhood friend, and Citrine's brother Julius. Julius, who is mentioned occasionally through the book, makes an appearance towards the end – and the description of him, and his wife, as he prepares himself for surgery, is one of the best parts of the book.And the book does have a lot of good parts. There's a beautiful section, early on, as Citrine is being driven through Chicago, and he describes, among other things, a skyscraper under construction. The letter that Humboldt writes Citrine at the end made me surprisingly emotional, as emotional as Citrine himself felt.One thing that struck me was Bellow's power of description – most forcibly at the Russian baths, especially of the man whose job is to pour water on the hot stones – but its not just there. Cantabile's nostrils “reminded me of an oboe when they dilated”. Demmie Vonghel's large collarbones form hollows, which Demmie, and her similarly built sister, would fill up with water and race. But sometimes, it feels too much, it's constant and unrelenting, and draws too much attention to itself.There's the other theme – that America loves its poets only when they fail, that America is too hard a country, too businesslike for sensitive poets.

It makes me wonder. How true is this? Was this the feeling of a moment in time? Yes, apart from Poe and Crane and Berryman, there was Sylivia Plath (who isn't mentioned at all), and Robert Lowell, who struggled with bipolar disorder all his life.  Of course, I don't know much about American poetry, but Ginsberg died surrounded by family and friends. Langston Hughes died an elder statesman, adored by younger Black poets.  And Americans - and people from around the world - mourned the loss of Maya Angelou, who not only lived and died well, but had a large circle of friends and well wishers. When John Ashbery died at 90, he was still working. Robert Frost may have had a traumatic personal life, but as far as public life was concerned, he was honoured so many times, and he died an American sage. But then again, my knowledge of American poets and poetry is negligible, and Bellow's is an interesting point of view. Despite being celebrated "a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him". Personally, that feels off. People - not everyone - but there are always people who are moved by poetry. What moves them will vary, but words have and will always have power. Ultimately, it was an interesting experience. It was worth reading the book, but will I read another Bellow? I'm not sure. But I will not seek them out. And as for the roman-a-clef part, about Humboldt and Delmore Schwartz? I'm curious about Schwartz now. And will probably look his poetry up. (But that, despite my love hate relationship with U2, could also be the fact that the song Acrobat from Achtung Baby was dedicated to Schwartz, and that Lou Reed wrote this about him.)

I'm nobody, who are you

Facebook is the “high school reunion from Hell”. Twitter is the “hosepipe of hatred”. Instagram is “Twitter for people who can't or won't read”. WhatsApp is the “official disinformation channel”.  These are all descriptions of social media – on social media. And the love-hate relationships that we have with this latest form of self-expression is both bewildering and addictive.

There have been reams written about the nature of our love for social media - the allure of self-presentation, the dopamine rush with every comment or like on a post, and the transformation of our very lives as social media performance.

All that is true - and social media is often depressing, frustrating, invidious. Women tend to face horrendous abuse and threats of rape and mutilation. Political arguments lose all nuance and turn into slugfests and shouting matches. Language is often vile. And the other aspect, that of one’s circle of friends and peers, turns on exclusivity, exotic holidays, the preciousness of precocious children - all leading to FOMO, the fear of missing out - a word that the Oxford Dictionary added way back in 2013.

But.

If you can accept that you will never have a life as interesting as your friends on Instagram or Facebook, that you will never know more than the economist or historian on Twitter, and you’re prepared to stay away from people you interact with on a regular basis in real life while on social media, there is so much scope for learning new things, to be entertained, to be amazed and to be provoked into thought.

It’s how you discover that the late Sultan Qaboos of Oman was a great fan of British light opera and Gilbert and Sullivan - and one of the reasons he led a coup against his father was that his father had stormed into his room and smashed his favourite record (the Pirates of Penzance). It’s finding out that both Gordon Greenidge and Vivian Richards made their test debuts here in this city, in 1974 - and Greenidge became the first West Indian to score a test century on debut while overseas. Or that we use the ‘x’ as the multiplication sign because of the efforts of a clergyman named WIlliam Oughtred, back in 1631. Or that the Marathi broadcaster and novelist Venu Chitale began her career at the BBC in 1940 as secretary to author George Orwell. Or that there is a kind of mollusc called the disco clam which uses a system of flashing lights to protect itself from predators. Its finding pictures of “beauties from Lucknow”, dating back to 1874. It’s finding out that Mary Burchell, an author of more than 110 Mills & Boon romance novels, used the money she made to save Jewish families from the Nazis before World War II.

And there’s subject-focused social media - virtual gatherings of old film fans, antiquarians, bibliophiles, mathematicians, astronomers, nature lovers - whose postings renew interest in things that you had hoped you’d left behind you, which went under the stultifying names of mathematics and biology and physics from your days in school or college; or bring to your attention films you should be seeing or books you should be reading - classics that no longer are on bestseller lists or the box office charts. And when you go from reading about books to reading them, and talking about them, from watching clips to watching a long forgotten classic that still retains its charm, your life is enriched.

Yes, posting a photo of yourself in exotic surroundings, looking as good as you van, artfully enhanced by tints and filters, and seeing the likes pour in can be immensely satisfying. So is making a smart comment about the state of the nation or the world, stimulating a comment chain a hundred posts long. But unless you’re a celebrity, with people waiting to engage with you, hanging on your every image or utterance, this is not going to happen. And when it does, it is usually accompanied by hateful remarks, ad-hominem insults, and general pettiness.

But if you are content with having fifty friends or followers - of which 40 may be bots, but are willing to follow hundreds of people who have interesting things to say, if you’re willing to prune your friends’ lists and following lists regularly and often, social media can be so rewarding. But if you keep trying to make that popular post, that viral video, that great selfie, you’ve just ended up “public, like a frog”, telling your name the livelong June, to an admiring (or otherwise) bog.

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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/im-nobody-who-are-you/articleshow/73616060.cms