Today was my second time as a creative writing facilitator  with Chillibreeze in Bangalore, at the Doodles and Scribbles Creative Writing Workshop, 2011. The theme of my workshop was using music to stimulate creative writing. The workshop was aimed at children in the 10-15 year age bracket. I selected a variety of musical pieces — Mozart, Vivaldi, Jazz, Hindi film song, and pop — and asked the kids to write in response to the music. What did the music make them feel and see? What words did they associate with each particular piece? Could they craft a story line based on the music and with the help of some topic-prompts? This  idea was totally experimental — I hadn’t tried anything like this before and approached the workshop with some fear and trepidation. What if the workshop totally bombed and no one could think of anything to write after listening to the music? What  if the children just stared at me in confusion? Was the concept too abstract for a 10-year-old to grasp?

My fears flew out of the room as soon as we embarked on the first exercise: listening and responding to “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Most of the participants associated it with bright colors, like orange, gold and green/yellow; with celebration; and with a formal setting, like a ballroom. They all got the basic idea  that music can correspond with moods and emotions, and were able to connect with the emotion behind a piece such as the Four Seasons. I had similar results when I played a Hindi film song (“Jai Ho” from Slumdog Millionaire), Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusic,” and “Taare Jameen Par,” from the film of the same name. Some were even creative enough to associate Mozart’s lively piece with a green salad and a Latin Jazz piece with road-side festivals. When asked to create stories, they produced imaginative pieces about Irish castles shrouded in mist, Kings and Queens in royal gardens, imaginary “time shifters,” metaphorical kidnappings, chasing after thieves, stolen birds, talking dolphins, and Tom and Jerry in outer space.

The final activity was a group activity asking the children to listen to Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” and write about a character with superhuman powers who had the power to make the world a better place. They invented imaginary supermen and women such as Captain Triple R, Ecogirl, Dr. Bandage Mesmer, and Plumbogreeno, who is  a plumber with magical powers to to save water, bring dead plants back to life, and end global warming. Their imaginations were on fire as some of them even drew pictures of their invented superhero to illustrate their narratives. This is the part of the workshop I personally liked because it gave them an opportunity to interact with others in their groups and collaborate on a piece of writing. Although the individual writing activity was popular with the kids, there’s nothing like group work to make a room come live with the sounds of many voices in animated conversation with one another. There was a spirit of freedom and abandon in the air that allowed their creative sides untrammeled access to the world of the imagination, all inspired by the sounds of music.

But let me rail against this fate. Let me rail against the end of long, silent summer afternoons interrupted by nothing other than the slow turning of pages as one moved steadily through an old classic; let me rail against the end of overstuffed armchairs, the soft light of a reading lamp, a steaming cup of Earl Grey, and a Somerset Maugham novel to get through; let me remember with nostalgia a time when sitting on green college lawns and reading W.B. Yeats was an experience of beauty and truth.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Internet. I appreciate it greatly.  It’s a great way to pass the time and a great source of information. I can read any poem I want any time I want thanks to the Internet. I can know when Paul Theroux’s new book is out and can read an excerpt from it without stirring out of my apartment. I can listen to authors speak about their works through podcasts that I download from the Internet. If anything, the Internet has brought distant worlds closer to me and has made them more accessible.

And there’s the rub. In bringing some things closer, it has pushed other things farther away. In making knowledge more accessible, it has also made it easier to get away with thinking, feeling, and doing less: When I know that I can command a poem by W.B. Yeats to appear on my screen at the click of a button, I have saved myself the trouble of experiencing that ache of longing, the ache to find a poem in a book, that specific poem in that specific book; I have spared myself the flustered, clumsy flipping of pages back and forth until – lo! — there it is again, with my undergraduate notations in the margins; there it is, after so long, like an old friend I haven’t seen in years but whom I have never forgotten.

To hold a book in one’s hands is to experience an author in a special way. It is to experience the labour that brought forth those pages. It is to hold a piece of another person’s life in your hands. It is to be faced with the incontrovertible truth that a person has, successfully or unsuccessfully, dedicated some years of his or her life to creating a body of work that could not have come into being without some suffering. It is to hold an ‘artifice of eternity’.

There is an eternity in which literature dwells, and there is this instantaneous instant of cyberspace. Have we traded one in for the other?

The subject of this post is driving in Bangalore, and WHAT THE HELL DO PEOPLE THINK THEY’RE DOING ON THE ROADS THESE DAYS!

Nuff said about potholes and the state of Bangalore’s roads, the fact  we’re driving not only on the left of the road but also on what’s left of the road. Enough said about all that, about bumper to bumper traffic that moves an inch an hour during peak traffic. There’s been plenty of venting about those themes. To add to these already existing woes you have all varieties of aberrant behavior on the roads.  Of aberrant varieties of pedestrian behaviour, the type I find most maddening is when people amble in the middle of the road, right in front of your approaching vehicle, with absolutely no intention of getting out of your way. It’s a silent war on the road, between your car and their legs. You can see it in their eyes, the way they walk more slowly than usual even though you are approaching at a speed of 40 kmph, staring blankly at your windscreen as if you aren’t there at all, as if even they aren’t there at all. You panic, but are hopeful that they will pick up the pace and leave the way clear for you, but your hope is in vain — their steps get slower just as you begin to accelerate. There’s something vaguely insolent about the whole encounter, cheeky even, dare-devil-like.

As for other drivers, forget about courtesy altogether. If there’s one inch of space between you and the next car, you can be sure that a motorcyclist will try to maneuver his way into that space; if you are at an intersection and another car is approaching from your right, you can be sure that the other car isn’t going to stop to let you pass by first. The rule is, no one give way to anyone; it’s every man for himself on these asphalt battlefields. Overtaking from the left is legion. Overtaking from any and all sides is a way of life. If you are patiently waiting for a chance to break through oncoming traffic, you can be sure that the guy next to you is going to squeeze his way past you first. There’s no such thing as “right of way”; it’s my way on the highway. People don’t so much drive as weave their way in and out of the traffic. If you can restrain the urge to remain in your lane and instead go with the flow by weaving your way through the vacant pockets in the traffic, you are sure to reach your destination sooner and prevent others from reaching theirs.

It’s the survival of the fittest and the fastest on these roads. Many dents later, I have learned some important lessons:

–don’t try to overtake the autorickshaw in front of you, because if you do, he’ll just creep up on you, accelerate,  and overtake you from the left.

–When you approach an intersection, always assume that a madly out-of-control vehicle lurks at the turning, waiting to plough right into your approaching vehicle.

–Never allow make the mistake of allowing yourself to get sandwiched between two racing buses.

–If a motorcyclist has made up his mind to cross your vehicle at right angles just when you’re trying to get ahead in the traffic, nothing is going to make him change his mind. Your stasis is his advantage, even more so when there are 4 people traveling on his bike.

–Always accelerate at an intersection, otherwise you will end up waiting for all the other cars to pass you by.

What does he think about when he runs, or when he thinks about running? In his typical, teasing style, he says: Nothing. Nothing at all.

“I’m often asked what I think about when I run. Usually, the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.

On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on hot days . . . And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning.

I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void” (16-17).

So what you get is about 180 pages  about this void in a spartan style that is a cross between Raymond Chandler — who inspired the title of this work — and Ernest Hemingway; Zen-like ruminations on the nothingness of everyday life through the lens of a writer and runner. It’s a book that’s as hard to describe as it is to put down.

It then struck me, the other day, that what this book is about is learning to cultivate a certain “stick-with-it-ness,” a dogged digging in of the heels in the face of faint-heartedness. The doggedness with which Murakami runs and his perseverance with running are the “glue” that keep him grounded and take him forward, past adversity and obstacles. It makes me believe that so much success in life derives from this simple lesson:  DO NOT GIVE UP.

Well, Committed pretty much “peels the onion” as far as marriage is concerned. Grandly renouncing the rose-tinted spectacles of romance, the author leaves no stone unturned in her quest to completely demythologize the world’s oldest and most revered institution — all in her own inimitable style. I must say that I envy her sense of humor and quick wit — both of which made Eat Pray Love such a resounding success.

The gist of Committed is that marriage is more often a curse than a blessing, especially for women. It’s something many women do because they feel that they have to. It’s a compulsion rather than a choice, a compulsion driven by thousands of years of rationalizations, injunctions, and decrees, as well as cultural stereotypes that leave no role for women other than as wives and mothers.  At the same time, there are, she acknowledges, good reasons to marry and to stay married:  children, companionship, stability, the experience of being a mother, the need for family — but these are not reasons that have ever appealed to her (and, dare I add, to me either).

“The exile feels that the state of exile has the structure of a dream. All at once, as in a dream, faces appear which he had forgotten, or perhaps had never met, places which he is undoubtedly seeing for the first time, but that he feels he knows from somewhere. The dream is a magnetic field which attracts images from the past, present and future. The exile suddenly sees in reality faces, events and images, drawn by the magnetic field of the dream; suddenly it seems as though his biography was written long before it was to be fulfilled, that his exile is therefore not the result of external circumstances nor his choice, but a jumble of coordinates which fate had long ago sketched out for him . . . (9).

There is something to be said for not reading books whose titles intrigue you:  this kind of ignorance brings with it a certain bliss, giving free reign to the imagination to invest the title with any association(s) one pleases. And so, thinking about Bombay-London-New York and imbuing it with associations of my own invention, being oblivious of the fact that it was not a travelogue, an autobiographical account of a Westward journey (although it does contain these elements), I was able to think about and cast my own life’s journey till date in a similar manner: except that mine would be called “New Delhi-New York- Bangalore.”

It could also be called “New York-New Delhi-Bangalore,” if I chose to locate the origin of the story of myself in New York, which would not exactly be wrong, I suppose; in fact, it might, surprisingly, actually be right. Because, for quirky and inexplicable reasons, my life did, in a manner of speaking, begin in New York, something unusual for an Indian of my generation. The unusualness is something I have had to live with; at times I have had to explain it in great detail to curious people, and then, having become tired of explaining this odd tie I have always had to New York, I swept it under the carpet and began to tell people, when asked “where I was from,” that I am from Delhi — which is also correct. If I were to say that I was from Bombay, that would also be correct. If I say that I am from Tamil Nadu, that is also correct — depending on what it means to be “from” somewhere.

You see, that is the catch. Where are you from? has never been an easy question for me to answer.

My most immediate gripe about Between the Assassinations is that its title bears very little relation to what is between its covers (a point also made by a reviewer for The Financial Times).  The “assassinations” the title refers to are the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and of her son Rajiv in 1991.  Neither the assassinations themselves nor events related to the assassinations  feature in the book. Instead, there is just a passing reference to Mrs. Gandhi in one of the chapters and a brief lament about how the country has gone to hell following her demise. Perhaps that is a pedantic objection. But it points to a flaw in the overall execution of the work and suggests a lack or absence of a thematic unity to the stories themselves.

What I will grant to Adiga is that he has a real talent for spinning a yarn, for foregrounding marginal social elements and giving them centre stage,  for sketching scenes rich in local colour,  and for creating attention-grabbing dialogue — and all in a simple, even if vulgarly comedic, style.  Book piracy, ubiquitous in all corners of India through the piles of pirated books sold on the footpath, comes to life through the story of Xerox, the bookseller; the rage of the lower castes is depicted through the eyes of Shankara, who fantasizes about exploding a bomb in the classroom of a local Jesuit-run school; there is the story of D’Mello, the cane-wielding assistant headmaster; Gururaj, the journalist who goes mad; and several other tales featuring a cast of characters who inhabit the margins of Indian society: lepers, amputees, drug peddlers, drunks, half-castes, lower caste Hoykas, pornographers, labourers, house servants, communists, gurkhas, and Muslim refugees.  Its motley collection of characters does not fail to entertain.

In many ways, Adiga’s humorous sketches of the struggles of the lower classes and castes recall the tales spun by V.S. Naipaul decades ago in early volumes such as Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas, the main difference being that Adiga has exchanged Port of Spain, Trinidad, and its gallery of impractical, eccentric dreamers for the coastal town of Kittur, located between Goa and Calicut on India’s southwest coast. And through the bewildering hysteria and chaos of a life lived on the margins, a picture emerges across Adiga’s 12 tales of the desperate struggles of the poor, the illiterate, the destitute, the oppressed, the fanatical, and delusional residents of Kittur against a backdrop of discrimination, caste wars, religious division, and general oppression. Hindus, Muslims, Brahmins, Kshatryias, Hoykas, and Catholics struggle in comic ways to exist side by side in this small town, resenting and hating one another, but getting by all the same.

One reviewer has commented about White Tiger that “it reads at a tremendous clip.” The same can be said about Between the Assassinations. The stories are packed with action, intrigue, plotting, and event. They protest loudly and stridently the inequities of caste, class, and power in contemporary Indian society. But I emerged from the experience  with my head in a whirl, not sure what to make of the loud cacophony that remained with me in the end.

Admittedly,  it was another sound bite that got the controversy going in the first place. Barack Obama in 2005, at the confirmation hearings for Chief Justice John Roberts, was quoted as having said that in a certain percentage of judicial decisions, “the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” His choice of Sonia Sotomayor as Souter’s replacement on the Supreme Court has been viewed by many as a reflection of that belief; and his candidate, by extension, as a vehicle of that idea.

Sotomayor effectively rebutted the suggestion that she would allow subjectivity to color her judgments and argued beyond a reasonable doubt that her rulings would be governed by the law rather than her heart, and that they always have been. There is little doubt that she will be confirmed in August. And justifiably so. She is cuts an impressive figure and has a sound track record. But the issues surrounding her hearings leave an important question unanswered: is there no place for empathy and “heart” in matters of law?

This is a question that is at least 2000 years old. It is the legal and ethical question that forms the basis of Sophocles’ Antigone, and it is one that Sophocles does not answer unequivocally. In Antigone, the eponymous heroine’s brother, Polyneices, has been denied burial rites by their uncle and King of Thebes, Creon, who has declared Polyneices a traitor and enemy of the state. Creon has declared an edict forbidding anyone from burying his nephew’s body on pain of death. Antigone defies the edict and buries her brother.  For it wasn’t Zeus who declared the edict; and “Nor did that Justice, dwelling with the gods/ beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men.” Creon’s adamant stance is that she has defied the law of the state and must be punished, even if she is his flesh and blood: “Sister’s child or closer in blood/Than all my family clustered at my altar/worshiping Guardian Zeus/She’ll never escape . . . the most barbaric death.”

Sophocles offers up the suggestion that Creon’s laws are flawed because they do not permit the emotions any place in deliberations over justice. From the law’s perspective, that Polyneices was a traitor to Thebes was enough justification to deny him burial rights; but from Antigone’s perspective, the perspective of the heart, of emotion, of empathy, the law was ironically doing a great injustice to a beloved family member and so had to be flouted in the interests of a higher form of justice: “. . . if I had allowed,” she says, “my own mother’s son to rot, an unburied corpse—/That would have been an agony!”

In other words, law, to Sophocles, is not as cut and dried as  the honorable American senators would have it. From the perspective of Greek tragedy, there can be situations in which the law falls short and when the heart must take over. This is one of literature’s dangerous lessons, and no doubt the very reason why Plato wanted to banish the poets from his ideal republic. But the issue appears to be far from resolved, even with the possibility of a wise Latina one day sitting in the Supreme Court.

“In one of the most famous essays of his dissident days, Havel asked his countrymen to live “as if” they were free — that is, to act in the spirit of internal freedom, despite their external constraints. But the regime practiced a grotesque inversion of this injunction: the citizens of Czechoslovakia were required to believe and pretend they were free, when they were effectively enslaved; that is, they were supposed to live a lie — and an imperative to live a lie sucks sense out of all activity.”

The previous owner of the book had marked a vertical line against this passage in the margin and had scrawled “my marriage.”

This  gave me pause. I found myself trying to imagine who this person was, whether a man or a woman, what had prompted him or her to made this connection between the citizens of a post-Communist regime and his or her marriage (a fascinating connection, I thought); I wondered whether this person was divorced or still in an oppressive marriage and “living a lie.” It was an intense moment, this unexpected revelation from an earlier reader of the very book I was holding in my hands. Used books draw me for that very reason: through them, you are in conversation not only with the book and its author, but also with the book’s earlier reader(s).