First, suspecting all Muslims as terrorists and presuming/declaring their guilt even before it is established. Let us face it. The notion of ‘benefit of doubt’ has disappeared entirely.

Second, how the media in Karnataka has become incapable of asking even the most elementary of questions, abandoned fairness as a principle, and do a decent investigative report. In fact, TV9 and our tabloids seem to be in the business of sensationalizing news. Further, our intelligentsia too has become saffronized; but the threat isn’t merely ideological polarization but the accompanying intolerance towards others who hold a different view.

So then the third, and perhaps the most important danger to our collective wellbeing, is the attitude of intolerance and the form in which this intolerance is displayed by Sangh Parivar: the threat of physical violence. To be fair, I must point out that apart from the Sangh Parivar, even Kannada activists and occasionally progressives too are guilty on this count.

The threat of physical intimidation that hangs over public life is perhaps the most serious of all threats that we need to wake up to. Gauri doesn’t stress on this aspect as much as I would have liked her to, since she has concentrated on the first two points.

Absent civility and a genuine commitment to non-violence, there will not be much worth defending, in Karnataka or anywhere else. For violence and intolerance taints even progressive causes and can only beget more violence. Hence, Gandhi is more relevant than ever, in teaching us how we should engage our adversaries.

New York Times has a story on Fagles’ new Aeneid. There are two paragraphs which caught my attention. Speaking about the text, Fagles says:

The great challenge, he said, was to master the two voices of “The Aeneid”: the stately public voice, the one that critics of Virgil used to say was just propaganda for Augustus, and the private voice of Aeneas’s personal sorrow.

“The modern tendency is to hear one voice to the exclusion of the other,” he explained. “We generally think of the public voice as the voice of betrayal, and the private voice as the only place where truth resides. But the truth in Virgil is more complicated than that, and you need to hear both.”

Fagles also talked about the contemporary relevance of Aeneid:

It’s a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.

“To begin with, it’s a cautionary tale,” Mr. Fagles said. “About the terrible ills that attend empire — its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it’s all done in the name of the rule of law, which you’d have a hard time ascribing to what we’re doing in the Middle East today.

“It’s also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

Time to read Aeneid again.

I picked up Amartya Sen’s new book Identity and Violence a few days ago and it looks quite interesting. I hope to review it later this week. Allen Lane reviews it in the Prospect magazine.
Jhumpa Lahiri writes on the Malgudi Days in the Boston Review. Please do read it. Sepoy, thanks for the tip.
For the cricket afficianados, here are two articles ( by Martin Williamson and Stephen Chalke) from Cricinfo
on one of the greatest cricketing moments: Jim Laker taking 19 wickets for 90 runs in a test match.
Parents introduced us, couples tell NYTimes.

They provide the English reader with a rewarding immersion in a little-known part of Camus’s work as he was blossoming into a writer of world fame, and also in the social and political questions that provoked Camus’s pieces, which have lost none of their acuity. It is astonishing to see how many of the issues on which Camus comments, and which were broached by the situation in which he was writing, anticipate and prefigure problems that continue to afflict us today. In his commentaries, Camus never stays on the surface of the events that provide his starting point; he is always searching for the deeper causes–moral, social, psychological, or ultimately religious (though he was not a believer of any kind)–that motivate human behavior. For this reason, many of these occasional writings still live. 

London Review of Books has this long essay entitled Blood for Oil. Read it for an interesting, plausible and even compelling explanation of US adventure in Iraq.

One of my favorite writers, E.L.Doctorow reviews The Iliad.

Homer (or the stable of poets incorporated under the name Homer) was either given to polytheistic fantasy or was the genius adapter of a system of cosmological metaphors that no one — not Dante, not Shakespeare, not Cervantes — has ever matched for sheer imaginative insanity. Read Homer’s hexameters and you find gods made in the image of man — jealous, mendacious, erotically charged, vengefully disposed, gender-specific know-it-alls, with empowering aptitudes that they wield as weapons in heaven as they do on earth. …… But who would give up the Iliad for the historical record? Evidence suggests the Homeric epic was transcribed after generations of oral transmission. The historical facts came down through the ages fused into blinding bardic revelation.

The novelist is not alone in understanding that reality is amenable to any construction placed upon it. … The historian and the novelist both work to deconstruct the aggregate fictions of their societies. The scholarship of the historian does this incrementally, the novelist more abruptly, from his unforgivable (but exciting) transgressions, as he writes his way in and around and under the historian’s work, animating it with the words that turn into the flesh and blood of living, feeling people. ….. The consanguinity of historians and novelists may be indicated by recent efforts of distinguished historians who, feeling themselves constrained by their discipline, have taken to writing novels. One presidential biographer has discovered no other way to accomplish his task than by yielding to unattributable flights of fancy. We should not be surprised by these border crossings. Who among writers of any genre would not want to see into the unseen?

Finally on some reflections on Happiness,  which Aristotle defines as “an activity of the soul that expresses virtue.” But as a commentator told the essayist, Jennifer Senior, “anyone who could maintain a state of happiness, given the state of the world, is living in a delusion.”

Question of the week: You think the Soul can express Virtue today or anyone who thinks thus is delusional?

May the best team (France?) win!

Once proudly socialist and nonaligned, India is being remade as a roaring capitalist success story and emerging strategic partner of the United States. Economic reforms have raised per capita GDP and lowered poverty rates, while New Delhi’s growing self-confidence may help it become the swing state in the global balance of power.

In this special lead package, therefore, Foreign Affairs has brought together four top experts to analyze the sources and implications of India’s rise — and the policies necessary for it to continue.

Read this news story in the Hindu on training truck drivers, who are being recruited to work in the U.S. Hey, if you can make more than entry level programmers or even assistant professors make, more power to them.

Smooth roads, cabins with plush interiors, well-maintained vehicles, insurance cover, fixed working hours and $4,000 to $5,000 a month. What more could a truck driver ask for?

Honestly, I have been obsessed with the tragic life of this extraordinary playwright and I will share my notes within the next day or so. But here is a very nice and insightful profile that Subramanyam wrote. It’s a short piece and very well written. I may be violating some copyright laws by posting thisbut this piece should be widely read and it also complements what I want to write soon on Samsa.

Samsa: A Recollection

by

A. N. Subramanyam

A tall, lean and straight figure with receding hair and wide forehead. Frequent knitting of eyebrows. In repose, a hawklike and distant expression. An occasional deaf ear to someone or something. Soft, yet matter of fact, voice, sharp in argument. A sardonic smile reserved for lesser mortals like relatives, successful scholars. Non-descript three-piece dress (dhoti, shirt and towel) of the intelligentsia of the times. that didactic thrust of the index and middle fingers of the right hand while driving home a point or reciting a poem. That essential shyness of the litterateur: After the command performance of Vigada Vikaramaraya, when requested to appear on the stage, he left the palace remarking that the play is the thing.

His circumstances were unhappy, if not sordid. They contained no ingradient of success. He was too unsophisticated to make the grade. The successful astrologer in him, who made many a famous astrologer wince about his future, was quite indifferent to his own fortunes. His ability to bear hardship and his utter unconcern to comfort made him a stoic. This and a passion to avoid personal obligations, checkmated every move to help him. Frustrated well-wishers became part of his unsettled life. All this made him a non-conformist. Instability dogged him, whether as a Pandit in a southern college or as a white collar worker in Quetta. Because of his unstable temperament, he was wont to speak of crossing over to other religions.

Out of this welter emerged, a capacity for sustained literary work and a purposeful literary career. His non-age saw Kaushala, a novel in Kannada. Followed in those phlegmatic days, a piece in English: Sherlock Holmes in Jail, a novel which ended in an Indian, a mere native, rescuing the great one. He composed Samsapadam, a style-book on prosody, on the lines of Nagavarma’s classic. He evolved and perfected the technique of historical drama, with an idiom all his own. There was a method in his madness, which meant long hours with manuscripts and inscriptions in the Oriental Library. Otherwise, how could reel off, from memory, derivations of old Kannada words from Classics, giving cross references and meanings from Kittel’s Dictionary?

A conflict between literary work and personal disillusionment tore his later years. A verse in Samsapadam describes the world as a stage for play of the wanton, half-way house for straggling souls, an inn to drink from the mirage of pleasure. With the passage of time, in his last days, this wayward thought hardened into an obsession that an alien police machine was unjustly persecuting him. Perhaps it had no basis in fact. But it did damage and brought about his tragic end. That he cared to live to write his plays was the fault, not of himself, but of his stars.

It is estimated that more than 40,000 women and children will be imported to Germany during the month-long competition to provide commercial sex in the “mega-brothels,” “quickie shacks,” other legalized venues and vast underground networks that exist in Germany.

We are familiar with alcohol abuse and violence perpetrated by Soccer fans. But as the French coach Raymond Domenech says:

It is truly scandalous. People are talking about women, importing them to satisfy the base instincts of people associated with football. It is humiliating enough for me that football is linked with alcohol and violence. But this is worse. It is slaves that will come and be put into houses. Human beings are being talked about like cattle, and football is linked with that.

This ugly side of the beautiful game is shameful and totally unacceptable.