“Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can’t make decisions about himself…..“
Kenzaburo Oe‘s novel “A Personal Matter” is a harrowing, dark, grotesque and depressing journey of self-deception of a middle aged man (nicknamed Bird) running away from realities confronting his life materialized in his case as an infant son born with congenital brain hernia and the burning need to gain freedom by putting an end to the life of the infant to pursue his obsession of traveling in Africa. Through a series of what appear as meaningless motions and interactions with weird acquaintances of his, Bird gains a realization of the need to put an end to this self deception and carry on into the future with a sense of determination, hope and responsibility.
What elevated the reading experience for me is the beautiful style of writing in which Kenzaburo Oe narrates with exceptional clarity the perilous and depressing journey of Bird and yet delivers us at the doorsteps of hope, redemption and relief. The writing throughout is laced profusely with impressive similes and metaphors and adds to the gravity of the narrative flow.
It is said that a good translation of an original work of art is a new work of art in itself and credit to that should rest with John Nathan who translated this small but powerful novel in a way that comes across as natural and effortless.
2021 ends well with the satisfaction of having read not only one more wonderful novel but also getting exposed to a new writer in Kenzaburo Oe. Hope to read more of his works in 2022.
Went home for 5 days and found these three tomish anthologies covering nearly a 100 year development/evolution/progress/degeneration of Telugu short story…. Will be a enriching 2022.
At the end of it I will be able to calibrate the quality of this writing with the world of short story out there…..
My hometown/district (Hanmakonda/Warangal) is quite famous for cotton dhurries which are woven on looms.
On a recent visit to my hometown, I spent some time with a couple of Weaver Co-operative Societies to buy some dhurries. Dhurries form an important product in the Handloom Sector of Telangana. Had long and interesting conversations with leaders who front-end the sales and marketing efforts for their respective societies and also coordinate the overall operations. The demand for handloom products is usually from the open market as well as specific orders from Govt (material for residential schools, Bathukamma sarees etc). These societies take orders from Govt and supply to TSCO, Govt. Residential Schools etc.
Like handloom sector across the country, Telangana handloom sector also is hanging in there by a thin thread. In order to support the sector Telangana State Govt from its side has done the following:
Geo tagged the looms to improve visibility and traceability.
Gives subsidies on yarns and dyes – ensuring raw material costs do not spiral out of control.
Encourages specific saving schemes with a 1 to 1 matching contribution for every rupee saved by the weaver.
Demand support by giving work.
These interventions have given some relief to the suffering weavers and the rampant suicides of weavers of the past is an infrequent occurrence now (The arty-farty intellectuals with superficial knowledge of the dynamics of this sector who wring their hands at every single opportunity will hopefully remember the haunting movie “Susman” made by Shyam Benegal). With Corona, the sector once again got hit badly with some experienced weavers dying and the younger generation unwilling to come into the profession of their fathers (Why should they ?).
All kinds of staple cotton needed for the yarn is grown locally, but the yarn comes from Coimbatore, gets dyed locally. The dyed yarn and the designs get distributed to weavers who are scattered across villages of rural Warangal on a job work basis and the finished produce gets collected and sold through retail outlets (which are actually front-ends of godowns) Demand has been slowing down and on top of it the present BJP Govt is raising GST from 5% to 12% thereby depressing demand further leading to potential unemployment, displacement and the decline of the sector.
All of the above is the backdrop/context to an interesting dynamic I am about to outline and here it is: Both the showrooms were replete with Hindutva symbols including the largest poster of the upcoming Ram Mandir in Ayodhya I have seen till date. Piqued, I asked the owners if this right wing turn/patronage is a recent one. I was surprised to learn that this was on for 3 generations now. A few things they told me interested me ( a few I can verify and a few I am not sure if they can be verified at all):
One of the first 2 BJP MPs India had – A Mr.Janga Reddi from Warangal had significant support of Weaver community.
Within BC castes there are janyu (jandhyam) dhari communities and non janyudhari communities. And typically the janyudhari communities have right wing proclivities.
Weaver communities in Telangana moved to support TRS for a while and are now drifting back to BJP : Someting I have noticed with the Fisherman communities of Telangana too… especially the urban lot who have no touch with their caste based profession Initially in my conversation, I received very curt answers but as I started talking about geo tagging, staples, counts, TSCO orders and Bathukamma sarees folks opened up… and we had a free flow of words.
My parting question to them was: BJP is increasing GST rates, killing your market while the state Govt is supporting you with demand, subsidies, visibility and saving schemes so why this support to unfriendly Central Govt and in the process weakening the state Govt which is supporting them with their livelihoods. The response: It runs in our families, we have been doing it for generations and will broadly continue to do so.
I did not say anything. I felt puzzled. Suddenly out of nowhere the expression – a favourite with Social Anthropologists – “PRIMORDIAL LOYALTIES” swam into my mind. I am not even sure if this irrationality can even be called primordial loyalty or it is just a few families of one community which have strong political preferences…. I left it at that.
Bought a few dhurries for friends in Bangalore that my purse allowed and came back. I am now left with more questions than answers and a thinner purse than before.
Here are a few pictures of the various dhurries we bought….
Maternal grandfather’s house…. Something will replace it in a few years from now…. Some men and women who lived in it are gone eternally, some are gone for better life…. the memories are still there…. but they too will be gone…. Behind that locked door grandmom used to keep all the goodies and massive pickle jars along with photos and statues of various gods and goddesses who I always felt remained indifferent to the people whom they prayed…
I am one among the millions who transitioned from Bharat to India…. there is no courage left to go back to Bharat… if at all there is anything left it is a combination of modicum of empathy and a fair bit of understanding of its plight…. I have seen untouchability being practiced but I also saw post card/inland letters/airmail/ telegram/dial phone being replaced by internet and mobile telephony… I am a strange being constantly morphing in the burning crucible called TIME….
Christmas is round the corner and in line with that and as part of our ongoing reading activities we read the following today:
Christmas Bells – H.W.Longfellow
Christmas Day in the Morning – Pearl S.Buck
Both reflect the festive spirit of kindness and love.
I started the poem by explaining the context of American Civil War and how it affected Longfellow as a person and the powerful message of Sanity, Goodwill & Peace he conveys through the sounds of church bells. I especially emphasized on these memorable stanzas of the poem:
Then from each black, accursed mouth The cannon thundered in the South, And with the sound The carols drowned Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° And in despair I bowed my head; “There is no peace on earth,” I said; “For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
Ms.Buck‘s is a powerful story told in extraordinarily simple words of how acts of love and kindness trigger further such acts through one’s life.
Both the story and the poem were well received by the children.
We have now introduced poetry recitation as part of our weekly activities and since we had time on hand, two members of our group recited “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost (both covered in our previous sessions). I want children to learn by heart about 50 poems that they enjoyed listening to in our sessions. Learning a poem is making it your own forever and there is something good about such memorization.
As part of our weekly story reading session we read the following today:
The Old Clock On The Stairs – H. W. Longfellow (Poem)
A Dark Brown Dog – Stephen Crane
Longfellow‘s poem outlines the eternal nature of time and its characteristic to watch all proceedings on earth impartially (in this case) through the sounds of a grandfather clock located in a once well lived mansion. Longfellow replaces “tick – tock,” sounds of a clock with “Forever – never & Never – forever” to create magic through words….
Through days of sorrow and of mirth, Through days of death and days of birth, Through every swift vicissitude Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood, And as if, like God, it all things saw, It calmly repeats those words of awe, “Forever—never! Never—forever!”
A longish poem well received by the children.
Stephen Crane‘s “A Dark Brown Dog” is an eternal favourite among anthologists. It is a well written story about a small child and his relationship with his pet dog and cruelty of people towards animals. Definitely not a favourite of mine but I was not sure if I was missing aspects that multiple anthologists were seeing in it – and hence the selection. The reaction of the children ranged between understanding indifference to actively liking it. None said they disliked it but it was very evident that it is not one of their better liked stories.
Beyond the usual “Science” & “Fiction,” well written science fiction also creates a vast scope for interesting “What- If” kind of social commentary – broadly speculative but almost always tantalizingly credible, insightful and very often realistic.
Science and technology have become an inalienable part of humans and the accelerated pace at which newer inventions, discoveries and solutions are being given shape to is forcing a kind of slavish dependency of mankind on them. Massive interconnected systems (e.g. Agriculture, Banking, Trade, Town Planning, Healthcare, Education etc) get built to benefit from these inventions and human societies adopt, adapt and eventually integrate themselves into these systems. All remains fine till these systems function glitch free. But the day some aspect of these systems malfunction, the repercussions ripple across and the overall response of human societies makes for interesting development and consequent social commentary. No other genre of fiction makes this commentary as interesting as SF does. Into this broad framework fits John Wyndham‘s “The Day of the Triffids,” – a brilliantly imagined and written book.
Triffids are carnivorous, mobile plant beings which have an ability to produce alternative oils which the energy guzzling world needs badly. A massive proliferation of triffids coincides with a dazzling comet storm on earth which renders people blind and may dead. Triffids find it a suitable opportunity to gain upper hand over human beings and thus begins a reign of terror and decimation. The big question in front of the very few sighted surviving humans is how to rebuild a meaningful civilization while surviving the triffids? It is in answering this question that Wyndham demonstrates enormous imagination, empathy, wisdom, knowledge and understanding of the problems that humans are beset in present day societies. Wyndham feels that the present day human with his specialized skills is totally unsuitable to build a civilization ground up as that needs a great ability to synthesize and integrate which deep specializations act as natural barriers to. Beyond skills and knowledge, humans are also handicapped by attitudes which are difficult to alter in short spans of time. The human predicament that Wyndham so skillfully builds through the progress of the novel is desperate and dystopian yet towards the end he leaves the readers with a message that eventually kindness, cooperation, understanding and strongly shared objectives is what will redeem humans and give them a hopeful chance of survival.
There are many places in the book I was utterly taken in by the quality of Wyndham‘s writing. It is a prose that flows effortlessly and brings in so many angles that it made me stop and ponder. As far as I am concerned, the hallmark of any good writing is its ability to make you think and on that benchmark “The Day of Triffids” ranks really high. Given its scope and quality of writing, I recommend “The Day of Triffids” to anyone who likes to read books in general and not just sci-fi aficionados.
On a side note: Triffids and the comet storm in the book for me is a metaphor for calamities that human race faces from time to time. Imagine the recent Covid catastrophe being a hundred times more contagious and a thousand times more virulent… are we even capable of surviving such realities? What is the guarantee that we will not face something like that in the near future ? How should we be organised as a species to face and overcome such dystopian possibilities — these are somethings that will occupy my mind into the future….
(I am told there is a recent BBC movie version of the book — will be watching it soon)
As part of our ongoing story reading sessions we read the following today:
The Power of the Dog – Rudyard Kipling (Poem)
A story from James Herriot’s “The Lord God Made Them All”
The core theme in the poem and the story revolves around dogs as pets and how attached humans become to dogs and what goes through them when their pets depart. Kipling outlines with a touching sensitivity of a poet when he writes:
“When the fourteen years which Nature permits Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits, And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs To lethal chambers or loaded guns, Then you will find—it’s your own affair— But… you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.”
On the other hand Herriot writes with an extraordinary sensitivity of an animal lover and a practising vet the harrowing times he endures when he is forced to put a dog to sleep to avoid the definite pain it is likely to endure due to disease.
Both pieces we tackled today, I like to believe, build a sense of empathy in children and throw a sharp light on man animal relationship. It was a very satisfying session for kids and me alike.
The highlight of the session was when one of the children recited the poem “Invictus” to a loud applause of all other members.
I have come to Stephen Crane‘s novella “The Monster” through an interview given by Paul Auster.
The societal attitudes towards a horribly disfigured black in a fire accident- disfigured while attempting to save his employer’s child – is the core of this novella.
Combine the best elements of Harper Lee‘s “To Kill A Mocking Bird” and Mary Shelley‘s “Frankenstein” and you get this novella. Crane writes a prose that is powerful, descriptive and full of unique economy. One area where Crane excels is in depicting the way black people of his time spoke.
Superbly written…. enjoyed reading it. Deserves a reread.
With the intention of expanding activities for children in our apartment complex, we have begun experimenting with “Once in a Month” quiz program at my place.
These are some glimpses from the session of today.
The quiz is designed in such a way that it also reinforces the activities from our reading club with some dedicated questions/rounds having multiple clever pictorial clues from poems and stories we read. To score well, children have to have a good context and remembrance of stand out aspects of the material from reading activities. The idea is that it may nudge them to revisit the stories and read a little more critically and with attention to detail. Marks are awarded to teams who even outline a story or poem and not necessarily remember a specific author or title in response to a pictorial clue. Ultimately, it is the emotional experience derived from a story and the memory of it which is far more important to a child than anything else. Name of the author, title of the story etc are just meta data and not having such details is not a big lacuna.
Outside of these kind of questions we have also begun to introduce logical questions and some puzzles. The response in general has been good with children asking for more questions and rounds…. Hope to see this becoming a regular, entertaining and fun filled activity in our apartment complex.
In the long run, if these activities can make a difference to the general outlook and orientation of these children towards reading then that would be a heartening and desirable outcome.
Excursions Of A Bibliophile 