Land of Lime

Dissertator Sepoy writes on The Audacity of Hope in his spare time. This is the second posting in the series on Shri Barack Obama. Do read it.

Nothing makes me feel back at home in Mysore like a bit of absurdity.

Such as the news item I read this morning in the Andolana, Mysore leading morning newspaper.

The Karnataka State Government in its infinite wisdom decided to honor poet and critic Dr. G. S. Shivarurdappa as Rashtrakavi, the National poet laureate. Indeed a very nice gesture and GSS is deserving of the honor.

It also decided to offer one million rupee prize money but now a committee apparently has decided against making a one time lumpsum payment. Instead, the recommendation is for the Poet Laureate to get five thousand rupees per month for the rest of his life.

So why the change? Apparently, the Government doesn’t trust its Poet Laureate. It is worried that GSS might spend million rupees in one go.

Splendid.

Lapata has a fabulous post at Chapatimystery on the man of the hour, Barack Obama. Enjoy.

Here is the link to Orhan Pamuk’s intensely personal Nobel Lecture.

I don’t want to butcher it by picking out a few paragraphs.

Please do read it.

The New Yorker has a long essay on R K Narayan by Wyatt Mason, who tells the stories (of Greene helping Narayan and so on) and reviews the novels. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the essay.

Sainthood is a kind of legacy, but fiction writers tend to prefer devoted readers to ardent worshippers. To mark the occasion of Narayan’s centenary year, a range of reissues has recently appeared, introduced by a new generation of authors who see him not as a dated writer of historical consequence but as a timeless writer of aesthetic excellence. They focus less on his uncontested greatness than on his disputed goodness.

I have to think more about this concluding paragraph but Mason’s idea about the Indianness of Narayan’s novel is an interesting idea.

It is through this idea—that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one—that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not—indeed, cannot—chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land,” are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things.

Well, let us worry about the being and becoming conundrum some other time.

From the many reviews that I looked at, Roger Osborne’s new book Civilization: A New History of the Western World
seems to be a necessary reading.

Here are the links to reviews in New York Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph.

Some relevant paragraphs from these reviews.

Tim Gardam writes in The Guardian:

Osborne argues that we inherit a long intellectual tradition that has invoked civilisation as some unchallengeable virtue, the golden thread in Western history that weaves together, art, science, architecture, literature and philosophy. It allows us to keep faith in our values without their being tarnished by all the horrors of injustice and suffering that we have inflicted on our ourselves and other cultures. It allows us a false, optimistic narrative of our past so that we believe we can construct a similar story for our future; yet in reality that future is quite uncertain.

The reviewers seem to be somewhat uneasy about Osborne’s skepticism about the self proclaimed superiority of the Post-Enlightenment western civilization and his project to write a popular history from such a skeptical premise. Willam Grimes writes in the New York Times:

As he speeds through the history of the past 20 years, Mr. Osborne goes on something of a rant, teeing off against elitist art, abstract philosophy, the injection of moral categories into foreign policy, privatization of public industries and virtually everything else in sight, including and especially Western rationalism, a guiding light for 2,500 years.

“The fundamental western belief that there are rational ways of organizing the world which will bring benefit to all has been at the root of every human-made catastrophe that has overtaken us,” he writes, “yet many of us still believe that we have a bounden duty to bring our simplistic, universalizing, ‘progressive’ systems of government, economics, education, policing, judiciary and morals to every part of every society on the planet.”

Whew. Only at the end of the book does it become clear that Mr. Osborne has been engaged in a very strange project. While painstakingly reconstructing the imposing, intricate edifice of Western civilization, he has planted a series of explosive charges. And then, when the job is done, he lights the fuses and watches as the entire thing collapses into dust.

OK. Civilization is officially on our reading list.