Creatures and things we don't see, revisited

The author Vandana Singh left a comment on this post about human apathy towards other life-forms, and I thought it worthwhile to put it up here separately. Here it is - do take the time to read it.

My deepest condolences, and thanks for connecting to my essay.

I don't think the problem is specifically to do with Indians. One thing I've noticed from living in the US for a while is that often the same sort of attitudes or practices persist, but they are not out in the open. In India, everything is out in the open, such as animal abuse. In the US there are plenty of shelters filled with abandoned animals, some of them horribly abused (one dog I saw had been shot by his owner). My own dog is a rescue from some abused past that still haunts him.

I think, though, that the possibility that Indian attitudes toward animals has worsened over the years deserves deeper analysis. I can only present a hypothesis or two for what they're worth: consider the fact that my mother and many people from her generation who were raised in small towns or villages, still regard animals as ensouled beings who also have to live. Consider old practices that my mother still follows, of giving rice grains and so on to the birds or ants after you sort the grains. Consider that once India didn't have factory farms for meat, that once that would have been unthinkable, to line up animals in tiny cages so they couldn't even turn around, and subject them to unbelievable terror and cruelty – this is common practice in the US on a scale of millions of animals every single day, and is considered scientific farming.

Consider also the observation that the less educated, less westernized chowkidars actually are able to treat the dogs like fellow beings.

My suspicion is that we in India are in the middle of a cultural transformation, likely brought about by a) a colonised mind-set that compels us to blindly accept Western notions and paradigms without examining them, b) increasingly globalized consumerist culture that emphasizes I over we and therefore one's individual status and power and wealth over social good and environmental health. I've mentioned in my article naturalist Valmik Thapar's conjecture that the only reason why so many animals survived in India despite the population explosion was because of the Hindu attitude toward animals, one also reflected in other religions of the subcontinent – but in particular the idea that animals and humans are not essentially different and via reincarnation one can get to be various life-forms, so they are kin to us. One does not have to take this literally, or even be a Hindu to recognize our kinship with all beings, but one can see how this kinship might still exist among poor people who haven't had an expensive Western education/ cultural brainwashing beat it out of them.

Think about this: India's natural resources have taken more hits in the last two decades than in the 200 years of British rule. Think about how it makes certain corporations drool to see "their" coal and oil under all those forests. Isn't it easier to rape and pillage a land if the attitude toward animals and trees and forests can be undermined? And how much easier it is to do that when people are disconnected from each other and plugged into a global urban culture that is all about feeding the insatiable appetite for things, things, things? Undermining a love for nature and animals paves the way for mass scale destruction of the world habitat.

This might sound unduly portentous and melodramatic but sadly, it is true.

I suggest that likeminded people of all backgrounds rally together to make kinship with our street dogs, the local trees, the local patches of nature not swallowed up by our endless greed. I also have a lot of hope in children, who can make their families change their attitudes. Start a nature club! When I was growing up in Delhi, we did this with great success in many schools but it should work just as well in various colonies and apartment complexes.

In solidarity,
Vandana Singh

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[Note: in a small way, this discussion ties in with the Mr Colpeper character in A Canterbury Tale – a lonesome crusader who has a strong connection with the natural world and is concerned about the relentless march of "progress" (though he is incapable of discerning between the good and bad aspects of a modern world). Perhaps one reason why I've been thinking so much lately about that very moving film]

Collective mourning in the internet age

[Did this somewhat slapdash piece for Business Standard’s “Eye Culture” space last week. Putting it here mainly because the BS website still looks as terrible as it did in 2003 when I first trolled it]

A few years ago I used to write a column called Neterati for this paper – basically, a round-up of what denizens of the Internet were saying about a newsy topic, along with slivers of tasteful (or so I hoped) commentary. The column has long been put to rest, but my fingers began itching something fierce last week when my Facebook timeline and every website I clicked on became jammed with eulogies to Rajesh Khanna. The dominant expression of sorrow was an “RIP Kaka” followed, in a few cases, by what I assume was a mistyped smiley face (it appeared to be winking and crying simultaneously) – but what do I know?

Whenever an old-time movie-star dies – even if it now happens every other week – “an era comes to an end”. This we have long known from obituaries in print and electronic media. In the cyber-age, though, the quantum of group-hugging – and the eagerness to share in a collective experience in real time – can be staggering. Much has already been written about how social networking gives us instant outlets for self-expression in times of joy and grief, but a couple of things about the reaction to Khanna’s death were particularly notable.

One was the nature of the nostalgia involved. Among the more self-aware comments I read came from someone who said he disliked Khanna as an actor, but that was beside the point. “My friends and I used to laugh at his mannerisms. Yet, when I heard the news I almost wept. There's so much history – years of watching his movies, talking about how he hammed a scene. He became a part of growing up and in a weird way, almost like a distant family member.” Still more interesting were the displays of yearning for a past that the yearner had never experienced firsthand, along with the Golden Ageist tendency to sentimentalise “a time when things were so much simpler” – it was common to see youngsters shedding virtual tears because Khanna had meant so much to their parents or grandparents, never mind that they weren’t much familiar with his work themselves. (This is easy to relate to: much of my personal interest in Hindi movie stars of the 1960s is tied to my mother’s memories of the time, and to fascinated speculation about what the world was like when my parents were young.)

One thing I heartily approved of was the widespread linking to videos of songs from such films as Amar Prem and Kati Patang; these are lovely tunes, we should use every chance we get to spread them around. But consider some of the accompanying commentary. On my news feed, a link to “Zindagi Kaisi Hai Paheli” carried the remark “Kaka knows his death from 1971 and this movie and song says it all.” (Or: how to retrospectively turn a star into a soothsayer.) Interesting discussions can be had – in other spaces – about how a popular movie star with a distinct personality might become the “co-author” of his roles (a post along those lines here), but some of the reactions to Khanna’s passing took this to a new level, giving him credit for the things he said in his films; dialogues and lyrics became meta-commentaries on his life. It was easy to predict that TV channels would endlessly replay the famous death scene from Anand, with its rich possibilities for subtextual analysis: the future superstar (Amitabh Bachchan as Dr Bhaskar) presiding over the passing of the current one (Khanna as Anand); the playing of a tape that reminds us that the dead man will always live on (in much the same way that Khanna’s best screen moments will continue to be accessible to us).

In our more composed moments, we can scoff at all this. But it tells us something important about that beast called superstardom, at whose scaly feet rationality must bow and scrape. The sort of popularity Khanna attained in the early 1970s involves a mysterious and immeasurable connect between viewer and screen persona – a bond that has fuelled commercial cinema since the days of Chaplin, Valentino and Lillian Gish. Such stardom is made up of some permutations of obsessive personal identification, wish-fulfilment, romantic love and platonic crushes (with all the talk about screaming college girls and marriage proposals written in blood, it gets forgotten that Khanna also had a huge base of fixated male fans). And a necessary by-product of this is the inability to separate the star from the roles.

And so, even as a non-fan, I’ll belatedly add to the sentimental chorus. So what if the man himself had been out of the public glare – and basically irrelevant – for most of the last three decades? So what if it’s unlikely that he was a lovable Anand in real life? All that matters now is the chord he struck with millions of people, the joy he spread for so long – and the fact that he had the good sense to shuffle off his mortal coil in the Facebook and YouTube age.

[A post from a few months ago: Zombie Rajesh in Shaitani Anand]

A Canterbury Tale – a great spiritual film for the incurable nastik

Preamble to an essay: In the Hindi cinema I grew up watching, the definition of “nastik” (atheist) was a hazy one. It never meant authentic, matter-of-fact nonbelief in God: that didn’t even seem to be an option. It was more a case of “bhagwaan se katti hoon” – I’m not on speaking terms with Him because He allowed bad things to happen to my family. Early in the Bachchan-starrer Nastik, little Shankar sulks and tells an idol “Aaj se mera-tera koi vaasta nahin.” But in the film’s climax, when God (or rather the gleaming, jewellery-studded statue that represents Him) shows belated willingness to help by impaling wicked Amjad Khan with a trident, everything is hunky-dory again and it’s back to waking up the neighborhood by clanging those old temple bells. This is a nicely self-serving version of faith, comparable to Pascal’s Wager, which places the “choice” of believing or disbelieving in the context of what one stands to gain or lose.

As you can tell, I don’t usually turn to 1980s Hindi movies for nuanced portrayals of religious faith (or its absence). However, even as a non-believer, there is a small group of “spiritual” films that I find interesting and provocative. These include the work of the Danish director Carl Dreyer (especially Day of Wrath, about a young woman accused of witchcraft) and Ingmar Bergman (who wrestled with the subject of faith throughout his career, notably in Winter Light). Occupying a very special place on the list is the British film A Canterbury Tale, made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger during World War II. This is among my absolute favourite movies, and one that I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. What follows below is an attempt (note: this is a piece-in-progress, I intend to add to it over time – possibly as part of a larger project).

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Pilgrim’s progress

When I first became interested in the technicalities of moviemaking, one of my favourite extended sequences was the opening 15 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ending with the famous cut from a bone flung into the air to a spacecraft seen against the backdrop of outer space – a million years(?) in time bridged by the visual linking of two similarly shaped objects. Soon I learnt that this was called a “match cut” - that shot, along with a few other iconic movie scenes, was responsible for my choosing film editing as the subject for a sketchy and derivative post-grad thesis.

I was reminded of 2001 (and of my brief obsession with match cuts) when I watched the opening scene of A Canterbury Tale. The match cut here marks a shift of a “mere” 600 years, from the time of Chaucer’s pilgrims to the Second World War, and the cut is from a pilgrim’s hawk soaring across the sky to a fighter plane occupying the same space in the frame (a parallel link is established by two close-ups of a man watching from the ground, played by the same actor dressed first in 14th century clothes and then in a modern army uniform). The background in both time periods is the same – the English countryside, beautifully shot – but as the contemporary story begins and a tank lumbers into view, a voiceover drolly informs us that “another kind of pilgrim” is now on the move.

The Powell-Pressburger team had made propaganda films to boost wartime morale in the early 1940s, among them 49th Parallel, about a group of Nazis coming ashore in Canada and facing more resistance and courage than they bargained for. A Canterbury Tale does in a sense belong to that band of films – the war was very much on when it was made – but the ideas expressed here are subtler and more open to interpretation than in the earlier movies. The plot centres on - of all things - an attempt to discover the identity of a man who accosts young women late at night and pours glue into their hair. This has seemingly little to do with the big events concerning the world at the time, but by the time we arrive at the superb, graceful climax at the Canterbury cathedral it's evident that there is much going on beneath the surface of this strange story.

Most of the film is set in a small Kent town named Chillingbourne, a 10-minute train journey from Canterbury, and it begins with circumstances bringing three young people together at the station: a drawling American sergeant named Bob Johnson (played by a real-life soldier named John Sweets, who is something of an affable proto-Montgomery Clift), a “Land Girl” named Alison Smith (the spirited Sheila Sim) and a British sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price, who was so good in another of my favourite British films of the 1940s, Kind Hearts and Coronets). As they leave the station in pitch dark (blackouts being essential in wartime), Alison becomes the latest victim of the Glue Man. (If the reference to “sticky stuff” in her hair reminds you of There’s Something About Mary, congrats – you’re an eclectic movie buff.)

At this early stage the script is emphasising the differences between the Brits and the Americans, two ways of life (represented by the wide-eyed Bob Johnson in one corner and everyone else in the other corner) forced together by circumstance. Chillingbourne was established as a municipal borough in the year 1085, the station master says, pointedly adding for Johnson’s benefit, “407 years before Columbus discovered America”. When Bob takes out an extra-bright flashlight and starts waving it around, much to the horror of those around him, it becomes a display of American brashness, especially incongruous in this quiet little town. Later, a little boy points at him and calls out “This is an American soldier” as if he were identifying a rarely seen species of butterfly.

However, as the film continues, subtler schisms reveal themselves (and meanwhile the drawling Yank is turning into an enormously likable character). “This isn’t Chicago,” someone tells Bob at one point, perhaps naming one of the few American cities he has heard of – to which Bob quietly responds, “I come from Oregon.” Something similar occurs later when Peter, remarking on a tiny local river, says “I’ll admit it isn’t the Mississippi” and the American replies “I’ll admit I haven’t seen the Mississippi.” This is familiar cross-cultural discourse between people who think of other countries in terms of a few easily identifiable characteristics and landmarks, without realising how diverse those places can be. It is also, needless to say, a barrier to deeper understanding of another kind of life.

Slowly we realise that the contrast isn’t so much between two countries but between the city and the countryside and the types of lives they come to represent – and by extension, the difference between traditional and modern values. Thus, the girl from London can’t find common ground with her new employer, the town’s wheelwright, but the American soldier, being the son of a woodsman himself, can talk endlessly with him about different varieties of trees and cutting methods. (“We speak the same language,” he tells the girl, “I know about woods.”)

At other times the dialogue comments on the differences in the level of communal spirit to be found in big and small places. A town spinster has long resigned herself to being “a maid” because the only man who ever proposed to her lived in a big, soulless London house on one of those streets where “different kinds of unhappiness are packed close together”. When Alison asks a local, “Do you know Mr Colpeper?” she is met with an incredulous stare. “You’re from London, aren’t you?” he says. “Well, what if I asked do you know who the Lord Mayor of London is?”

“But I don’t,” she says innocently.

Speaking of Mr Colpeper...
 
Showing them the light

Colpeper, played by Eric Portman, is the film’s other major character – the town’s respected local magistrate (and a bachelor who lives in an incongruously big house with his mother). When we first see him, it’s an imperial shot of him sitting at his desk, two plump lightbulbs on either side of his head – and indeed, the film consistently uses light as a motif and symbol. When a night guard calls out to Colpeper “You’re showing a light, sir”, the context is that the magistrate – working late at night – hasn’t fully drawn one of the curtains in his study; but given what we learn later, the line can be seen as having a double meaning. In another scene, we see his head – in silhouette – against a circular light cast on a screen (he is showing a few short films and giving a talk about cultural heritage) and the result is a halo effect; this could be the Buddha speaking to his disciples about the interconnectedness of all things.

This initially distant figure soon becomes the most visible face of the film's moral complexities; one of the things that made A Canterbury Tale so compelling for me was the tension in my attitudes to Colpeper and what he stands for. He is a traditionalist, deeply attached to a pastoral way of life that is under threat in a modernising world, and this can be an attractive quality – one appreciates that he is close to nature and that he has a genuine respect for history. However, the flip side is that his view of progress is not very far from that of the religious fundamentalist; some of the things he seems to approve of are deeply discomfiting (unless you happen to be the sort of person who thinks dunking chairs should be used to keep “transgressing” women in check – and of course, many such people do exist even in seemingly modern families in our own society).

“I felt as a missionary must feel when the savages come to him,” Colpeper says, speaking of the opportunity he has to lecture a whole regiment of soldiers about the region’s glorious past. These scenes are genial enough, but one can never lose sight of how easily this sort of missionary-aspiration can turn into something unpleasant, especially if he were to be given power over others. (In this context, consider that Portman, who plays Colpeper with grace and dignity, also brought a certain charisma to the Nazi leader in 49th Parallel!) The Glue Man attacks, which are intended to keep young local women from staying out too late with visiting soldiers, are a short step away from a full-blown sexual assault – of the sort that a repressed man overly preoccupied with women’s “virtue” and “honour” is fully capable of. But Colpeper would certainly approve of them.

Yet he is also shown to be a melancholy man, capable of introspecting and acknowledging his mistakes – and he is a figure of sympathy because we know he is fighting a lost cause. At the end of the story, the young people will move on with their lives but this middle-aged man will return to his house and his old mother; the war will soon finish, the young soldiers (his “savages”) will return home, there will be no one left to attend his lectures; the world will change, centres of control will shift, more pragmatic and hard-edged ideologies will take over. Nearly seven decades after the film was made, now that we know that the milieu it depicted barely exists anymore, Colpeper’s nostalgia becomes more poignant and he himself becomes less threatening.

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Colpeper’s nemesis within the narrative is the sardonic, probably agnostic Peter, and the two men have an exchange of words in a late scene set in a train taking the four main characters to Canterbury (where they will each experience a moment of benediction or self-awareness). There is a moment of Pure Cinema here that counts among my favourite movie scenes ever: the train pulls into the brightness of Canterbury station and Peter, sitting by the window, is ethereally lit up by the sunlight outside just as he says the words “I’ll believe that when I see a halo around my head.” This is such a magnificently conceived and executed shot that I feel stupid trying to describe it with bare words. It is also a lovely visual evocation of the idea that these people have entered a mystical realm; a place where “blessings are received, or penance done”, and where the usual rules don’t apply. (The best Powell-Pressburger films, such as A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, similarly combine an apparently realist plot with lovely otherworldly scenes.)

Peter is the least likely of the main characters to believe in miracles, and so it’s a nicely ironic touch that the halo effect is reserved for him - and also that he becomes something of an Angel of Mercy at the end. Of the four personal epiphanies shown in the film’s last 15 minutes, his is arguably the least dramatic - the story of a man who once wanted to be a church organist and ended up playing the organ in a movie theatre instead - but it’s the one I found the most moving. Dennis Price, who has the smallest role of the four main actors, comes into his own in this section, his flint-eyed determination to bring the Glue Man to justice slowly yielding to something more melancholy and introspective as he finds himself drawn into the church by a vagrant hymn sheet (a suggestion of mystical forces at work, or just the wind?) and towards the grand piano he has so long yearned to play. In contrast, the two “blessings” that await Allison and Bob were a little too pat for my liking, but they are treated with understatement.

A Canterbury Tale may seem to be a film that believes strongly in divine blessings and redemption (I don’t know what Powell-Pressburger’s own theological leanings were) but even the irreligious mind should have no trouble appreciating what Canterbury comes to represent for each of these characters. It can be seen as a place where one comes to make peace with oneself, finding solace by recalling the struggles of other people who lived centuries ago – and thus momentarily becoming part of something larger (something that doesn’t have to be supernatural). Seen this way, the towering cathedral isn’t so much a symbol of divinity but a venue for introspection and for the surfacing of finer feelings.

The cathedral is just behind the movie theatre, Colpeper tells Bob early in the film. He says it sarcastically – he’s bemused that the American is interested primarily in watching movies during his off-hours, rather than taking in the local culture. But I’ll plumb for a more personal interpretation of those words: going to a movie hall showing a good print of A Canterbury Tale would constitute a minor pilgrimage for me. In its unshowy way, this film is incredibly insightful about things that should concern any thinking human being: how we live with each other, what values we deem worth holding on to and what should be let go of. There is more depth and complexity in its many graceful passages than in most of those dramatic scenes of our heroes berating or negotiating with their deities in moments of crisis.

On Cyrus Mistry's Chronicle of a Corpse-Bearer

[Did a version of this review for Tehelka]

The narrator-protagonist of Cyrus Mistry’s new novel is born into a life of religious privilege but forsakes it for a much less reputable existence. Though the son of a Parsi head priest, Phiroze Elchidana quickly tires of “holy smoke, salutary fragrances and workday miracles” and develops a rebellious streak. “The older I grew the more absurd any requirement of pomposity or piety seemed.” Like the hero of a similarly plaintive novel, M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song – about a Pir shrine heir carrying the burden of divinity – Phiroze dreams of escaping “the narrow, claustral world of the fire temple”. But escape comes in an unusual form: he ends up plying the trade of a khandhiah or corpse-bearer, meditating on the inscrutability of death and lamenting a lost love.

Properly speaking, Phiroze’s narrative spans eight decades (he relates it as an octogenarian in the mid-1990s), but the meat of the story is set in the years leading up to Independence, when the key events of his life take place. Having already disappointed his family by failing his exams, he falls for Sepideh, the daughter of a khandhiah, in a “lush arboreal kingdom” (the grounds of south Bombay’s Tower of Silence, to which Parsi corpses are carried for their final rendezvous with vultures). He marries her in defiance of his father, loses her a few years later when she is bitten by a snake (in their personal Garden of Eden, no less), and soon afterwards participates with his fellow khandhiahs in a non-cooperation movement that parallels Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India call.

This is a wide-ranging tale and there are things to admire in it – not least Mistry’s feel for lives that are under-represented in our literature: the Parsi community’s marginalised members, facing social disapprobation, hypocrisy and unfair working conditions even as a modern city, with its “throbbing nervous energy”, comes up around them. There are moving passages such as the one where Phiroze, after yielding to the sexual advances of a loathsome contractor – hitherto presented as a stock villain –reflects that the experience wasn’t as odious as he thought it would be. “I felt, after a very long time, human again; grateful to Buchia that he saw me as more than just some cadaverous, unclean thing whose very breath it was undesirable to commingle with.”

Unfortunately, what at first appears to be a deliberately melancholy tone – suited to this weary man – soon comes to seem like storytelling slackness, as Phiroze rambles on about a variety of subjects without really dwelling on any. Many of the brief asides, such as the one about Hitler’s exclusion of Jewish athletes from the 1936 Olympics (not without relevance to this tale about discrimination), are not organically woven into the narrative but presented as discrete information. There is an unevenness in the writing too. Phiroze (or should one say Mistry) mostly employs the coolly elegant style one associates with much of pre-Rushdie Indian Anglophone literature, but every now and then there is an attempt to be chatty and informal. Thus, a chunk of text is put in parentheses as Phiroze interrupts himself to supply incidental information; a stray sentence begins “Can’t remember if I mentioned this earlier...”.

It might in fact have been better if this were the dominant mode – elliptical, hesitant, vulnerable. As it is, the refinement of the narrative sometimes becomes a barrier to grasping Phiroze’s feelings. (“Seppy, I do miss you very much,” he writes, “If only you were still here with me, I wouldn’t be afraid.”) The effect is of constantly being told about an intense, all-consuming relationship – and the effect it has had on a life – without actually getting to feel its depth. And it doesn’t help that Sepideh herself is practically absent from the narrative – an odd thing in a work described by its publisher as “a moving account of tragic love”. In fairness, Phiroze does attempt to explain this: “Seppy’s gone, and because she’s no more, I must rely solely on recollection to evoke what would surely have overblown into an impersonation larger than life. [...] How quickly it becomes difficult to remember a person who is dead with any sort of clarity.” This ties in with the book’s meditations on the nature of death and the absence of a larger pattern in our lives. And yet, to get a sense of Pheroze’s actions and imperatives, I felt more space needed to be given to the love that defined him.

The Author’s Note reveals that this book began life as a documentary on corpse-bearers, which Mistry had been commissioned to write. This may account for the fact that much of it reads less like a well-paced, internally consistent novel and more like fragmented socio-history, trying to say too much about too many things. In the process, the man at its centre becomes nearly as much of a stranger to us as those anonymous cadavers he carries through his city.

The 2012 Osian’s Cinefan festival

For movie buffs in Delhi, Cinefan is back after a gap of two years (or is it three? The last time I attended it was in 2008). There’s a schedule up on the official website (though it looks a bit disorganised at this point) – apart from the film screenings, there will be some interesting panel discussions as well as night-time music events at blueFROG. I’m moderating a session for the Rockstar team on August 1, and hope to catch a few films as well.

[Some posts about movies I have seen at Cinefan over the years: the Pakistani gore film Zibahkhana; the lovely My Father My Lord; Mizoguchi and the benshi; Greed and Bioscope; Driving to Zigzigland; Scream of the Ants]

Notes on Sudeep Chakravarti and Highway 39

A few days ago I moderated the launch of Sudeep Chakravarti’s Highway 39: Journeys Through a Fractured Land, a narrative about the troubled histories of Nagaland and Manipur. It’s a fine book, part travelogue, part social and political commentary, written as a series of vignettes and encounters that should make it very accessible to the lay-reader (including the person who thinks of “the northeast” as an amorphous blob, not realising what a tangled skein of relationships there is between the states, and within each state). Chakravarti travelled at length, collected a lot of information, and then put most of it together as a personal narrative. Throughout, he wears his emotions on his sleeve: when he meets Vidyarani, an 11-year-old Manipuri girl who was detained by police because they wanted her parents to come out of hiding, he mentions being overcome by emotion because she is the same age as his own daughter (who is leading a happy, secure life back home) – this gives him a more immediate entry point into her story. There are other such epiphanies in the narrative.

One of the things I found interesting about the book was that it accommodates two very different tones: there is the cool, dispassionate voice of a journalist wanting to find the truth and tell it as bluntly as possible, and there is the warm, troubled gaze of someone who cares deeply about his country and who is therefore all the more concerned about the things being done to preserve the “idea of India” at all cost. Reading Highway 39, I kept thinking about a popular meme, often circulated by those who are inclined to be unquestioningly patriotic – the gist of it is: “Throughout its history, India has never invaded another country.” This is, to say the least, a rosy and simplified view of things. In his Introduction, Chakravarti matter-of-factly likens Nehru’s treatment of the Naga territories in the 1950s to American intervention in Vietnam, and goes on to present a picture of a country that is hung up on maintaining an image of unity and benevolence.

Majaw’s guest launches into a harangue about the greatness of India. I can’t help thinking: there must be somewhere fundamentally wrong – or perhaps, fundamentally still raw – with the construct of India, if more than sixty years after independence from Great Britain we still need to try so hard, so institutionally, at patriotism.

(On a lighter note, Chakravarti uses the catchy phrase “the paternalistic embrace of IST” to comment on the bizarreness of there being a single Indian Standard Time despite the vast breadth of the country – perhaps another expression of the need to preserve an Idea, even in the face of common sense.)

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Not doing a proper review here, but an observation or two about Chakravarti (henceforth Sudeep), who is one of the sharpest people I know. He was my first boss in journalism more than a decade ago (this was at The NewspaperToday.com, India Today’s 24-hour news website) and anyone who worked under him at the time will confirm that he was a terrifying figure – the epitome of the steely-eyed editor with insanely high standards, refusing to clear pages even if production deadlines were racing by. The large glass windows of our plush Videocon Tower office would rattle whenever he lost his temper, which was often.

At the time, Sudeep had already been a senior editor at India Today for many years (it doesn’t get more mainstream than that in Indian journalism – for good and for bad) and it seemed likely that he would continue to work in the pressure-cooker environment of daily deadlines for another two decades at least. But then something unusual happened: still only in his early 40s, he stepped away from this life, moved to Goa and decided to concentrate on long-form writing. When I met him around 2004 (by which time all residue of the master-servant relationship had thankfully vanished), he told me he had many ideas for books he wanted to write, and that it was high time he got started. This is the sort of thing journalists/writers say all the time (before heading off for a spree of cocktail launches that are expressly designed to keep them from getting work done), but Sudeep put his typing fingers where his mouth was; Highway 39 is the fifth book he has published since 2005, and the range and quality of his work has been impressive. There have been three novels, starting with the very entertaining Tin Fish, and two works of narrative non-fiction (the other one was Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country).

This career trajectory should be inspiring to anyone who believes (and it’s surprising how many people in India do) that if you want to write books you have to start at a very young age. It’s also a reminder that good narrative journalism is not the exclusive province of energetic youngsters who haven’t yet started families of their own and who find it easy to lead itinerant, unsettled lives. I suspect that the research process for Red Sun and Highway 39 enabled Sudeep to return to his journalistic roots – to push himself out of a comfort zone and get back into the “field”. And these are larger canvases than he ever had as a full-time journalist. At the launch, he expressed gladness that Indian publishers today are more open to doing such books than they were 25 – or even 10 – years ago. And in his Intro, he suggests that he will do more books on the region, especially on Assam. That’s something to look forward to.

On wolves and humans, colony dogs, other beastly tales

[Unorganised notes on some things that have been on my mind in a post-Fox world]

I’ve been reading Steven Kotler’s A Small Furry Hope: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life (originally published in the US as A Small Furry Prayer) – this is an intimate, probing work that moves between the author’s experiences running an animal rescue shelter with his wife in Mexico and larger philosophical and scientific questions about animal intelligence, the difference between art and altruism, the human-animal bond and its ecological repercussions. Kotler covers much ground on these subjects and does it compellingly, interspersing them with his own personal growth as a dog-lover.

One very interesting passage is about the history of human cohabitation with dogs – or rather, with the wolves that eventually became dogs. Archaeologists once believed that humans and canids began living together only around 14,000 years ago, but subsequent DNA analysis (tracing the genetic split between wolves and dogs) suggests that the relationship goes back much further – to a time, more than 100,000 years ago, when our small-brained ancestors made their way from Africa to Eurasia and began hunting with wolves; and that this had a big effect on the development of both species.

Tracing the co-evolution of humans and wolves, the Viennese zoologist Wolfgang (yes!) Schleidt has observed: “There is something in the bond among wolves, and between dogs and humans, that goes beyond that between us and our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees.” Recent research suggests that early man may have “learnt” much of his social behaviour from observing wolves. From Kotler’s book:

Scientists can trace intelligence, self-awareness and long-term planning to our chimpanzee ancestry, but as Schleidt points out in “Apes, Wolves, and the Trek to Humanity”, traits such as patience, loyalty, cooperation and devotion to both one’s immediate family and to a larger social group are not prevalent among primates. “The closest approximation to human morality we can find in nature is that of the gray wolf, Canis lupus,” he writes.

Kotler also quotes Jane Goodall:

Chimpanzees are individualists. They are boisterous and volatile in the wild. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to get the better of each other. They are not pack animals. If you watch wolves within a pack, nuzzling each other, wagging their tails in greeting, licking and protecting the pups, you see all the characteristics we love in dogs, including loyalty. If you watch wild chimps, you see the love between mother and offspring, and the bond between siblings. Other relationships tend to be opportunistic.

Some of this is necessarily speculation, but there are strong indications that some of the “human” qualities we most value today are by-products of our ancient interaction with this other species. Recently much good research has been done on the physiological benefits of being in a relationship with a dog, and as Kotler puts it, “we have evolved to co-habit with dogs. Their presence is part of makes us feel safe in the world. Remove them from our lives and there are bound to be consequences.”

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But of course, urban development is specifically geared to weeding out the natural world from human lives; it’s based on the hubris that we are exalted creatures, capable of leading autonomous lives in our concrete bubbles, never mind the consequences for the ecology and for our own health. Some years ago I did this interview with the author Vandana Singh, where she spoke of the self-absorption of human beings, our inability to “see” other creatures and our cosy certainty that our destinies are unrelated to those of “lesser” beings (except of course when they can be exploited for our benefit). Singh wrote eloquently about all this in her piece “The Creatures we Don’t See: Thoughts on the Animal Other”.

In recent times I’ve often had cause to think about the determination with which some people cut themselves off from other life forms. Nearly each time I took Foxie down for her walk, I had to ignore hostile stares from people in the neighbourhood: what should have been uncomplicatedly happy, quality time often became a dispiriting experience where I was constantly feeling defensive, constantly primed for a confrontation. Frequently, old people (people who may well have led decent, moral lives but who never in all their decades had the enormously uplifting experience of being close to an animal) looked at us darkly and muttered things under their breath; this when Fox was doing nothing more offensive than running around after a tennis ball. There were occasional fights with residents who didn’t want to see dogs in the tiny excuse for a park we have downstairs (this is a cut-off segment of a larger area that was a green park when we moved here in 1987, but which is now exclusively a car park). Even when I assured them that she never used this section of the grounds as a toilet, there were sullen expressions or pronouncements about how they would be forced to “handle this situation in our own way”.

Fox with one of the local boys

Our colony has had its street dogs for years now – their numbers have always been under control and a small but devoted group of animal lovers have taken responsibility for their vaccinations, sterilisations and food; these dogs are docile and a couple of them even spend part of the day in the garden or courtyard of a dog-friendly resident. Their ancestors were dominant inhabitants of this terrain as recently as 40 or 50 years ago – before the land-clearing and DDA construction boom began in Saket in the late 60s. But that scarcely counts for anything now; if you’re sold on the idea that man “has dominion” over all other creatures, you don’t have to be troubled by something as trifling as conscience. And for as long as I can remember, these animals – and their very few protectors – have faced the ire of the vast majority of households in the colony.

When we first moved here, my mother was regularly screamed at by the people in our building because she would put food out for a couple of dogs (who would sometimes sleep at the bottom of the stairway). A divorcee living alone with a 10-year-old son, she was seen as being essentially helpless, and some of the abuse that came her way (from the married women in the building, no less) had threatening undertones that I won’t spell out here – except to say that I was reminded of it recently when I heard that a young girl who feeds street dogs had been menaced with an undisguised sexual threat by the “humans” living near her house.

(My wife, when she was staying alone in a Mayur Vihar flat in 2006-07 before we got married, was subjected to similar hectoring – culminating in an episode where a group of at least 15-20 people were practically at her doorstep, waving their fists at her. Single women are ripe targets for this sort of thing, which makes one wonder if the animals are just a pretext for the playing out of socio-cultural bullying and other dark imperatives.)

It’s worth spelling these things out, because from conversations with friends who are indifferent (not hostile) to animals, I realise that many well-meaning people have no idea just how marginalised and hounded animal-lovers can become in these situations. A few months ago members of our Residents’ Welfare Association attempted to have the local strays taken away and destroyed by coercing children to put tick-marks on a paper with the questions “Are you scared of the strays? Have you been chased or bitten by them? Do you want them removed?” That includes the majority of kids who were not scared (because they had no reason to be). The matter was resolved – for then – when one of our dog-Samaritans got the children together, had a candid conversation with them, asked if there had been any disturbing incidents, and told them exactly what would be done to the dogs if they were taken away. Some of these children – displaying the honesty, compassion and common sense that appears singularly lacking in adult homosapiens – then went and politely asked their parents to back off. It worked for the time being, but we aren’t deluding ourselves that this was anything more than a tiny battle won.

There is a tendency, among those who don’t like animals, to get all bleeding-heart about “the many human beings who are in an equally bad state – shouldn’t we do something to help them first?” There are obvious logical flaws in this argument: is this a zero-sum game? Is human welfare unrelated to that of other life? And are they saying that we need to completely eradicate all human suffering from the planet – as if that is ever possible – before we turn our attention to non-human animals? But beyond that I find this self-serving argument funny because, in my experience, many of the people who use it are just as apathetic to other human beings - the ones they don’t count among family and friends, or at least “equals”. True compassion isn’t a quality that can be neatly rationed out by withholding it from one species (or social class, or religion, or caste – you pick the group). Those RWA goons who jump up and down when they see dogs in their precious manicured parks... I find it no surprise that they yell just as loudly when the colony’s ayahs, drivers and other domestic staff sit down to have lunch together in that park. So much for being more concerned about “human beings”.

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Flipping through the papers yesterday, my eyes fell on an advertisement for 3M Car Care. I initially misunderstood the tone of the ad, but it turned out to be a sardonic comment on “desi ways to keep your car new”, with accompanying illustrations. One of the stated methods was “Don’t allow pets in your car” and the drawing alongside showed what to my eyes looked like a little dog being flung out of a vehicle (a marginally kinder interpretation is that the admonishing hand reaching out from inside the car was warning the dog to stay away).

To put it very mildly, I haven’t been in a cheerful mood the last few weeks, and seeing an image like this was not going to get me feeling better. (Apart from everything else it reminded me of how, the day after we took Foxie to her burial site – in our car – I found myself in the back-seat of the vehicle, trying foolishly to gather bits of fur so I could store it in a little box. Whenever I’m in the car now, I feel a measure of irrational comfort from the knowledge that she so often travelled in it. The car – otherwise an ugly metal heap that I rarely use and have absolutely no emotional attachment to – has become more valuable because of its associations with her.)

A blurry, unintentionally arty camera-phone photo of Fox
in the back-seat, taken through the front mirror

Even so, looking at that drawing, an involuntary snort escaped me. The picture was such an apt representation of the cheerfully callous way in which many people treat their “pets” in this city. In the litany of abandonment stories one keeps hearing, a common theme is that of dogs being thrown out of moving vehicles when their “owners” decide they can no longer take responsibility for them. Such things happen dozens of times every day (and animal-welfare organisations like Friendicoes get flak because they don’t have the resources to deal with this quantum of cruelty) – it’s a transparently obvious manifestation of an attitude that considers non-human animals as disposable property with no feelings of their own - not “special”, like we humans apparently are.

[Some related thoughts in these posts: vindication of the rights of "brutes"; Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation; dogs and dog-owners]