Category: Culture

A tale of two horrors: poop and aliens

I saw this tweet yesterday:

Information like this always reminds me of one fact that awakened me to the behind-the-scenes role that the natural universe plays in our cultural lives. The organic compounds called indole and skatole are what give human poop its unique and uniquely disgusting smell – an odour that our brains have evolved to be repelled by so that humans, by whatever accident of fate, don’t consume the damned thing.

However, indole and skatole are also what make jasmine flowers smell so wonderful. This happens because the two compounds are present in higher concentrations in faecal matter and in lower concentrations in jasmine. This is essentially Lovecraftian horror at its best: like in the tale of Arthur Jermyn and his family, our horrors are not horrific inasmuch as they inhabit us. They don’t harm or pollute us in any sense. It is the interpretation of that information, after realising it, that can be so utterly devastating.

It is a story of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, triggering a sense of our biological identity having deluded our cultural one. In the case of Arthur Jermyn, the man sets himself on fire after realising that one of his paternal ancestors mated with a great ape. In the case of indole and skatole, many are likely to be thrown off their affinity for jasmine flowers. But I prefer thinking about it backwards: I like jasmine all the more for what it is because it redeems the two compounds, freeing them from the poopiness for which only evolution is to blame, not themselves.

Aside 1: I wouldn’t be able to do the same thing with an Arthur-Jermyn-like discovery, however: it is vastly more innate and visceral, and as inescapable for it.

Aside 2: This is the sort of horror I also find in the work of H.R. Giger.

In the same vein, the caste system (the Hindu version of which I am most familiar with) taints its followers with pseudoscience simply because it supersedes the biochemical composition of faecal matter with the inexplicable, immoral and dehumanising pall of untouchability. A person can be a great particle physicist, for example, but the moment he believes there is an untouchable caste whose members are deigned to clean drains, he also disbelieves the cleansing and deodourising potential of antibiotic solutions and chemical disinfectants. He, in effect, has elevated poop into a socio-cultural kryptonite up from the mass of organic compounds that it actually is, and becomes both a scientist and a pseudoscientist at once. There are many such people in India, and they demonstrate what they believe science to be: a separate entity isolated from the rest of society.

To quote Anton Chekhov,

To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.

(Thanks to Madhusudhan Raman for pointing this one out to me.)

This must not be construed as an attempt to trivialise the importance of culture, however, as the backward-case of jasmine should demonstrate. It is simply an example to illustrate the weird and fascinating fact that while scientific knowledge that underlies a human phenomenon can inhabit a continuum of possibilities – such as the increasing or decreasing concentrations of indole and skatole – it is entirely possible for the overlying cultural substrate to undergo more drastic, and analog, transformations – such as from desirable to detestable.

Don’t read beyond this point if you’re yet to watch Love, Death & Robots.

Episode 7 of the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots – entitled ‘Beyond the Aquila Rift’ – captures this transformation very well, albeit in a very material way. When a waylaid spacefarer wakes up after many months in a repair station lightyears away from his original destination, he begins to suspect that something about his ‘reality’ is amiss. He realises that he is in a simulation being fed to his brain by a superior entity and demands that he be allowed to see what his actual surroundings look like.

He suddenly wakes up in a dilapidated place covered entirely in webbing, with no apparent signs of life nearby. Then, the alien presence that was maintaining him in suspended animation shows itself thus:

Source: Netflix
Source: Netflix

The episode’s directors (Léon Bérelle, Dominique Boidin, Rémi Kozyra and Maxime Luère) and animators (Unit Image) did very well to depict this transformation in this way. The transition from lady to alien is scarred on my neural circuits, and if I look at it backwards, it only becomes more terrifying, as if it seems to ask: Will glimpses of the familiar suffice anymore?

Notes on ‘Avengers: Endgame’ (spoiler alert)

At the outset, I had a great time watching the film. It ticked all the boxes of an all-round entertainer.

What follows are some specific thoughts I had of the film that shouldn’t be construed as criticism or as gratuitous suggestions to ‘improve’ the film in any sense. Endgame was made to conclude a 22-film franchise; as much as it was epic, it had its role – to please fans not of one or the other narrative but of the MCU in toto – cut out. What follows are my observations – nothing less, nothing more.

Caution: Don’t continue reading if you haven’t watched Avengers: Endgame.

First: The film had been railroaded by the franchise it concluded. All of the MCU movies that came before, and lead up to, Endgame have tried to set a high entertainment bar and mostly succeeded (Venom and Age of Ultron were the exceptions). But that also meant that there couldn’t be a successful movie that didn’t represent the values any or all of the other movies carried and that didn’t – in simple terms – attempt to be epic. So credit to Kevin Feige and the Russo brothers for having delivered the epic in Endgame; in so doing, they did what was expected and didn’t mess it up.

(Aside: Or maybe they messed it up just a tiny bit? On Earth, when Tony Stark, Thor and Captain America face Thanos, the latter launches into a monologue about restarting all life in the universe over, after which he says something about the Avengers having made it “personal”. This is a man titan that has thus far kept things ostentatiously rational – to the point of being Malthusian – but saw fit at that moment to make it about himself. Why? I have no idea – but I suspect that the writers made him say so to consign him into irredeemable villainy from the audience’s PoV.)

But it also meant that at the outset, Endgame couldn’t be surprising. I for one didn’t for a moment believe that anything other than Thanos’s defeat was in the offing, and that in turn partly undermined those aspects of Endgame that all the other MCU movies before could make use of. Being ingenious becomes much less dramatic when it’s widely expected, especially at the end of a franchise that has already employed ultra-precise neurosurgery, a forge powered by a neutron star and AI-versus-AI battles.

Second: In Infinity War, Doctor Strange had figured that of the X million futures he had explored, the Avengers could triumph in only one, and for that Thanos had to win first. In this future, the Avengers could defeat Thanos by letting him win first, on his terms, and then recreating the conditions for victory and battling the titan on the Avengers’ terms. That’s clever.

But I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Doctor Strange could see into the future beyond the Vanishing itself, in that he could predict who would ‘vanish’ and who wouldn’t. The Vanishing is likely to have been random in terms of who ‘vanished’ and who didn’t because Thanos simply wished that 50% of life was killed, not which specific individuals. In effect, the Vanishing should have blocked Doctor Strange’s future-vision.

This matters because Endgame likely wouldn’t have been made if Stark, Bruce Banner and Scott Lang hadn’t survived. That they did in turn makes Endgame seem a bit contrived.

Third: I – and countless others – predicted that Endgame would have something to do with the quantum realm, and with time travel in the picture anything becomes possible. A lot of it is centred on one’s interpretation of time travel itself, but while Endgame handled it admirably, it wasn’t particularly impressive because the writers still kept the properties of the MCU quantum realm ambiguous and free from the responsibility to make sense. In effect, they could do with it as they pleased.

So kudos to them for not overdoing it (as Star Trek: Discovery often does) but at the same time no-kudos for resorting to an extremely predictable trope to simply reverse everything that had been wrought in Infinity War. To paraphrase Thanos, Avengers – like the Avengers – struggled to live with its failures.

Epic cinematic fantasy needs to stop wanting to go back in time every time anything goes belly-up. The writers did try to deflect this by referring to all the other Hollywood movies that used time travel wrong (and did something weird with Captain America’s final mission) but I don’t think the problem lies with how it is used, at least not anymore. The problem in 2019 is that movies need to stop using it altogether.

Featured image: A scene from the official trailer of Avengers: Endgame. Source: YouTube.

The fiction of men

After you find out that a male writer has been a lesser person than you thought he was, have you found it harder to read and appreciate his work?

I bet you have.

I’m sure it’s the case with female, rather non-male, writers too but most examples we know are those of men.

Now, I don’t read anywhere near as much as many people do and so haven’t been prompted to abandon as many writers as they might have – although I have stopped reading many blogs by scientists for the same reason (e.g. Tommaso Dorigo).

But I just finished reading this essay in the New Republic and now so many writers are written off, including Kurt Vonnegut, whose absurd fiction I’ve loved so much.

I remember when I first experienced what I’m feeling now, a sense of unsurprising surprise, as best as I can put it: in early 2014, Bora Zivkovic quit as the chief of Scientific American‘s sprawling blogs network.

I also remember briefly being in quasi-mourning at the time, for having lost the ability, opportunity and whatever else to be able to consume Zivkovic’s work with pleasure.

The sorrow was proxy for a lingering tension in my mind, one that yearned for a distinction between a creator and his creation, and to prove that a tainted creator could produce untainted work.

This sorrow has only deepened since August or so last year, when wave after wave of #MeToo allegations rocked the Indian literary and journalistic scene.

But what has also deepened is the sense that this is the history of men in modernity, and where men have gone, their poisonous masculinity and patriarchy has gone as well.

That the sadness I felt with Zivkovic and Dorigo and Vonnegut is misplaced because it is rooted in false histories, in stories fabricated by the forces of men.

That the good memories in whose shadows these tragedies purported to thrive didn’t exist either. It was always dark, and the darkness had been impregnated with delusions of blamelessness.

If we learnt to see in the dark, it doesn’t mean there was any more light. It just means we learnt to see in the dark.

The tragedy that is the names of men being knocked off from our lists of recommendations isn’t separate from the painfulness of readers such as myself not setting out to discover new writers who only deserve, likely deserve more so, to be cherished.

Because unless that happens, the darkness isn’t going to go away.

I shouldn’t be sad, leave alone surprised, that Vonnegut was an asshole. His fiction was never actually a pinprick of light, and the claim that it ever was is only more fictitious.

To be sure, this isn’t a declaration to write off all male writers inasmuch as admitting some in order to exonerate all of them is simply #NotAllMen by another name.

Writing is my way to make sense of my self, and this has been an exercise towards realising that the elision of one author from the roster must needs be accompanied by the discovery and inclusion of another.

Elision alone would be pointless, even deleterious, much as a smaller dark room is just as full of darkness as a larger dark one.

Fantasy and pseudoscience in Rajinikanth’s ‘2.0’

Rajinikanth’s film 2.0, which released last year, was recently uploaded on Amazon Prime and I finally watched it in its entirety. It is a dumpster-fire of masculinity, sexism and misogyny, which is not surprising after Petta was what it was. 2.0 also goes one step further and confuses fantasy for license to peddle pseudoscience, ultimately creating a movie that really tests the extent to which its viewers can suspend their disbelief.

One of the movie’s principal claims is that people possess “auras” composed of particles called “micro-photons” and that the “auras” have some kind of energy potential. Rajinikanth’s character then elaborates that a Russian scientist named Frank Baranowski has produced proof of their existence, that these “auras” can be rendered visible through a (simple) technique called Kirlian photography. The problem here is that a) everyone trusts the white guy more, and b) Frank Baranowski actually exists, and he’s been saying that people have “auras” and that godmen have bigger ones!

Fantasy is a form of fiction marked by creative imagination, frequently set in worlds and among peoples whose specific features have been invented to accentuate some narrative element that the author wishes to employ for effect. There are several types of stories within this parent genre that illustrate the different degrees to which fantastic elements make an appearance. But irrespective of their relative extremeness, fantasy stories are not classified as pseudoscience even though they may claim scientific value within the fiction’s narrative because they don’t attempt to explain the fantastic using the real. They explain the fantastic – should they have to – using only the fantastic.

Consider the example of Flatland, first published in 1884. In this book, the author Edwin Abbott Abbott describes a two-dimensional realm populated by men, who are lines, and women, who are points. It was intended as an allegory of life in the Victorian era and did not make specific claims as to the existence of such a realm in our physical universe. It remained allegorical from start to finish.

On the other hand, the Harry Potter series describes a secret world of wizardry hidden from our own by cleverly disguised magical barriers. Its books harbour as significant an element of the real as they do of the imagined, but when the fantastic is employed, the author makes no effort to ensure it is not mistaken for nonfiction because it is evident. This illustrates how even when the real and the imagined coexist, the author makes no attempts to breach the line that divides them, keeping the series in the same genre as Flatland. So while Harry, Ron and Hermione cross the magical gate into platform 9 3/4, the audience is given no reason to assume such a world really exists.

Different works of fantasy do this in different ways. A Song of Ice and Fire preserves the laws of physics so that dragons flap their wings like birds do to fly but is completely disinterested in how they might have evolved. Hulk and Spider-Man resort to ludicrous methods to make heroes of their protagonists but aside from some gibberish involving the words “radiation” and/or “gamma rays”, it isn’t clear why these men are what they are. Iron Man III asked us to believe one man built a particle accelerator in his basement and pushed right up against the wall between belief and disbelief.

But 2.0 tears this wall down, most pronouncedly in its attempts to explain what it believes is true. It seeks to justify itself and its choices using (questionable) information together with epistemological biases from the real world that make it seem as if its claims are legitimate. This is in bad faith: in the foreseeable future, there are always going to be people in the audience who may not be fully aware of where the real ends and the fantastic begins. But while fantasy fiction – as discussed – has always harboured the necessary implicit safeguards to maintain its qualification as such, S. Shankar – 2.0‘s writer and director – has ignored them and cheated.

The times demand pellucidity, so: Auras don’t exist. Micro-photons don’t exist. Neither auras nor micro-photons can be scientifically verified, insofar as science is defined as a way to systematically discover new information about the world and free it from cognitive biases to the extent possible. Frank Baranowski is mistaken. The products of Kirlian photography can be explained using a well-understood phenomenon called coronal discharge.

Indeed, ignoring its abject inability to surprise viewers given its cast of actors, 2.0 would have been a perfectly fine entertainer in the convention of Tamil cinema’s hero-fixated entertainers if it had dispensed with the self-justification. Shankar had to have known this, as much as he had to have known that the silver screen, for all its potential, is not an interface for dialogue. It is a one-way broadcast medium that does not brook disagreement in any forms other than commerce.

And by working his “aura” BS into a feature film in a way that betrays fantasy fiction’s purpose, Shankar has perpetrated what is at best a sleight of hand on 2.0‘s viewers, and a fraud at worst. I’m inclined to believe it’s fraud.

Poisoned trees bear poisonous fruits

Of late, there has been a clutch of Tamil films that have endeavoured to show the Hindu right-wing in poor light, associating its rituals with violence and oppression. The two most notable examples are Kaala and Petta, both starring Rajinikanth. Kaala was a modern adaptation of the Ramayana but told as if from Ravana’s point of view, although far from being an attempt to legitimise a ‘demon’ king, it is a story of a Tamil leader from Dharavi who fights off a Hindu thug. Petta on the other hand was less politically aware and more inclined to be entertaining, and found easy villains in the gau rakshak. So far so good.

However, a problem quickly arises in Petta that doesn’t in Kaala, nor in Kabali, also starring Rajinikanth and also directed by Pa. Ranjith, and Kaala‘s thematic predecessor. Both Kabali and Kaala were anti-caste and pointedly targeted Hindutvawadis, who have discriminatory practices hard-coded into their spiritual culture, and so carefully guided their protagonists away from all the markers of conservative Hinduism.

Petta is not so careful. It is not hard to sell the idea that a right-wing extremist is a bad person to an audience in a part of the country that largely thinks of itself as the last bastion of resistance against Hindutva nationalism. However, and like most Tamil movies that feature themes of Hinduism, Petta legitimises astrology. In a scene at the beginning of the film, an astrologer tells a goon that his ‘bad time’ has started because Kaali (Rajinikanth) is en route, referring to ‘astrological conditions’ that are unconducive to success and/or fulfilment.

In so doing, it reveals that it is unmindful of the fact that a) astrology is a form of oppression, and b) astrology and right-wing extremism exist on a continuum. Aside from its pseudoscientific credentials, astrology derives its oppressive power from the following attributes:

  1. It centralises knowledge in the hands of a few practitioners — who tend to be upper caste when they’re also high-profile — who don’t have any kind of accountability
  2. It derives its authority from scriptural utterances whose authority cannot be questioned
  3. It is deterministic and undermines human endeavour

Taken together, it is evidently a manifestation of the same superstitions and authoritarian tendencies that make right-wing extremism so potent, and so insidious. In turn, this renders Petta‘s positioning of the gau rakshaks hard to believe. If the gau rakshaks are one form of Hindu oppression, then Kaali is simply another, that somehow it is a question of kind and not degree when in fact it is one of degree.

To argue that one practice is harmless and the other is harmful would be to actively ignore the harm that festers in both of them, as much as a poisoned tree bears poisonous fruits. And while hypocrisies inhabit all of us, it is important that we acknowledge them instead of denying that they exist.

Star Wars and the dynastic principle

Late last week, I picked up Ram Guha’s Patriots and Partisans. I know shamefully little about India’s modern political history – before and after Independence – certainly beyond the virtual borders of its scientific and technological endeavours. And to someone as receptive to new ideas on this front as me, Guha’s writing is perfect: he’s lucid, coherent and – with kudos to his editor – his writing is well-structured. Two of the most interesting things I’m learning is M.K. Gandhi’s reformist beliefs of what it means to be a Hindu and the Gandhi family’s problems.

On the latter count, in a chapter entitled ‘A short history of Congress chamchagiri’ (Hindi for sycophancy), Guha elaborates:

The dynastic principle has damaged the workings of India’s pre-eminent political party, and beyond, the workings of Indian democracy itself. One manifestation … is the filling of important positions on the basis of [sycophancy] rather than competence. Another is that Mrs Indira Gandhi’s embrace of the dynastic principle for the Congress served as a ready model for other parties to emulate. With the exception of the cadre-based parties of left and right, the CPM and the BJP, all political parties in India have been converted into family firms.*

Here Guha proceeds to provide examples: the DMK, “now the private property of M. Karunanidhi and his children”; Bal Thackeray “could look no further than his son” given his “professed commitment to Maharashtrian pride and Hindu nationalism”; the mantle of leadership in the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal passed from “Mulayam’s party passed on to his son, and in Lalu’s party to his wife”, respectively. He continues:

The cult of the Nehru-Gandhis, dead and alive, is deeply inimical to the practice of democracy. For his part, Jawaharlal Nehru, following Gandhi, tried to base his policies on procedures and principles rather than on the force of his personality. Within the Congress, within the Cabinet, within the Parliament, Nehru worked to further the democratic, cooperative, collaborative ideals of the Indian Constitution. … Loyalty to the Leader, in person, rather than to the policies of her or her government – such was the legacy of Mrs Indira Gandhi, to be furthered and distorted by her progeny, and by leaders of other parties too. [And] What Indira did at the Centre was exceeded in the provinces…

This adherence to the dynastic principle, which Rahul Gandhi reminded us all of when he appointed his sister to lead the Congress’s fight in the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh bastion, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. And as Guha has articulated so well, those who practice it deserve to be suspected of being undemocratic, and have their beliefs and actions similarly tainted. There is no reason why the Congress should not be able to look beyond the immediate members of its core family.

The latest Star Wars teaser, for Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, is foreboding for the same reasons. Going beyond the franchise’s fixation on Western characters and insistence on keeping the protagonists white (to the unforgivable extent of casting Lupita Nyong’o and then using only her voice), the teaser suggests that Rey is a/the (?) new Skywalker. I’ll be as thrilled as anyone else if she was a new Skywalker, if the name becomes a label akin to the (clanless) Torchbearer in Star Trek: Discovery.

But if she turns out to be the new Skywalker, then the franchise’s writers will finally have completed their betrayal of the infinite purpose of the fantasy genre itself. They will have been utterly lazy – if not guilty of a form of creative manslaughter – if Rey turns out to be biologically related to the Skywalkers, broadcasting the message that either you’re royalty or you’re not, much like the Gandhis themselves have.

In fact, even if Rey doesn’t carry the Skywalker blood, and ‘Skywalker’ becomes a title that anyone can aspire to, it remains to be seen how Episode IX treats the dynasty itself: if it is afforded a soft landing and the luxury of a dignified exit (which seems likely given Luke’s farewell in The Last Jedi) or if it is brought down hard and blown to smithereens. Rather, and taking a step back, will the franchise endeavour to send any sort of clear message about the pitfalls of dynasty itself?

Featured image credit: Erika Wittlieb/pixabay.

Lord of the Rings Day

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! March 25 is celebrated as such around the world (though not by too many people, I imagine) to commemorate what still endures as an excellent work of epic fantasy as well as – by its fans – to commemorate Frodo’s destruction of the One Ring at Mount Doom.

I was recently having a conversation with Thomas M. and Srividya T., which he’d mooted by asking what fantasy fiction would’ve looked like today if it had descended not from J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal trilogy but from Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, which I’m yet to read.

The conversation swiftly segued to what it was that made Tolkien tick (the extent of inventiveness), the influences on Lord of the Rings (World War I and Christianity) and the parts of modern fantasy fiction that can’t trace their roots to Tolkien’s writing (drugs, sex and depiction of race). The last bit’s a bit of a stretch, of course: you’re either deriving from him or reacting to him.

This is what makes Lord of the Rings Day just as relevant 65 years after Fellowship of the Ring was first published. Lord of the Rings assumed primacy not because it was the first work of epic fantasy that we know of (this should take some research to uncover) but because it was the first major work of its kind written by a white, British man in the colonial era. And the fact that no fantasy fiction writer can ignore Tolkien on their way to creative glory is a testimony to our collective colonial hangover.

However, this doesn’t mean we should start ignoring Tolkien’s works. It’s important to remember at all times that irrespective of their provenance, Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are still brilliant fantasy, and by virtue of being fantasy, they’re much more than about their author alone.

For example, what I’ve always loved about fantasy fiction is that – inasmuch as it is an expression of trauma that struggles to find expression in the shared languages of the world (although Marlon James puts it much better in his 2019 Tolkien lecture) – the fantasies of others are frequently the seeds of our own worlds. Its reward is more of itself, and that’s beautiful.

So today, if you have the chance, pick up a copy of the Lord of the Rings, flip to a chapter you like and read it again. You might just have new ideas.

Featured image credit: Annie Spratt/Unsplash.

Singin’ in the rain, Vadivelu version

Stanley Donen, who co-directed the famous 1952 Hollywood film Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly, passed away on February 21. Though it released to moderate success at first, the film went on to become a cult classic. The titular song, first composed in 1929 and which “inspired” the film itself, according to its makers, received wider recognition in the coming decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ZYhVpdXbQ

The song was so iconic and loved that when Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was released 19 years later, the widespread backlash it received included complaints that it had tarnished the song’s image. In the film, Malcom McDowell’s character assaults a woman while singing the song.

For those who might not have seen the 1952 flick first, this would’ve been a ghastly way to discover ‘Singin’ in the rain’ – a song that Kelly performs in the film to express joy and contentment. Fortunately for me, I discovered the song in an unexpectedly different way – as, I imagine, did lakhs of other Tamil filmgoers in 2001.

In that year, the drama film Manadhai Thirudivittai (Tamil for ‘You’ve Stolen My Heart’) was released, starring Prabhu Deva and, more importantly, comedian Vadivelu. His character, named Steve Waugh, is a college student with many idiosyncratic quirks (in keeping with Vadivelu’s slapstick style). Back in his native village, his family is poor and barely gets by. But in the college, Steve Waugh maintains a façade of affluence (including boasting of a fictitious brother named Mark Waugh, a petroleum magnate in the UAE).

The film also stars comedian Vivek, and both Vadivelu and Vivek vie for the same woman. And whenever Vadivelu outsmarts Vivek for the woman’s attention, he breaks into song: “I’m siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing in the raaaaiiiiiiiiin! I’m sooooooooooooong in the raaaaiiiiiiiiin!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K92FFCnRDQk

I’m sure the more informed viewers were able to identify what Vadivelu was singing right away. For many of the rest of us, the song’s provenance and cultural influence struck home only much later.

But by that time, it had been so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it could never become the Gene Kelly sensation it originally was. It stayed on only as Vadivelu’s derivative – but no less joyous – performance, becoming a song that other actors of Tamil cinema have sung to the accompaniment of a singeing comeback.

And for most people who watched Manadhai Thirudivittai, Vadivelu’s rendition has remained, and will, his own classic: his rendition, his song, his words.

Are we obsessed with nominal identities?

In an interview to The Wire Science last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, the molecular biologist, acknowledged that Indians had a bizarre relationship with the fact that he was a Nobel laureate:

… the business from India was really strange because I’d left India when I was 19. I had almost nothing to do with Indian science except that I started coming to Bangalore and a few other places from about 2006. So the people who knew me in India were people in my field: molecular and structural biology. They knew my work. Nobody else cared about it. At all. (Emphasis added)

I gave a lecture in honour of G.N. Ramachandran in 2008 in Chennai. The hall was maybe half full. The next year a hall that was about three times as big was packed. What was the difference between 2008 and 2009? My work hadn’t changed. So I think it’s a very strange business.

The fact that he spent his whole scientific career outside India doesn’t seem to matter to many Indians, who simply gravitate towards his Indian origins and the nominal identity and think of him as Indian.

This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that his success is considered to be the success of an Indian scientist. It’s not.

The reason I bring this up now is this tweet, where you can see a similar problem at play:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Like Kaswan points out, Pritish Nandy’s and Tapan Chaki’s selection is flawed at the outset, and can’t be taken seriously for its complete lack of women. But beyond that, there’s also the identity problem. Manjul Bhargava neither studied nor worked in India, ever. Salman Rushdie studied abroad and has lived outside of India for most of his life. Siddhartha Mukherjee only did his schooling in India; he went abroad for his higher education and has been working there since. It’s a similar story with Zubin Mehta.

Many people have skewered Nandy and Chaki on Twitter for ‘packaging’ these people as Indians nonetheless, but to be fair, it is The Economic Times‘s doing, at least because the book’s page on the publisher website only says that these are “leaders who are constantly bringing change not just in India but across the world”.

This being the case, its lack of women – apart from Lata Mangeshkar – is the major problem (judging the book by its cover). In fact, it’s funny that it has been billed as a collector’s item and is set for “private circulation” in a market where the patriarchy that guided its creation is neither.

However, it also bothers me that the newspaper looks at these faces and sees all of them as Indians.

These people are, to me, Indians only in name, and for The Economic Times – or anyone else – to call them “India’s most famous” is offensive (although not for the anti-nationalist nonsense). First, it sets a bar for the sort of fame that begets recognition that’s unjust to the many people who have lived and worked here, who are most familiar with its conditions and, most importantly, whose success represents work that is more meaningful to the country’s status quo and aspirations.

For example, if a mathematician who studied in India and works in India solves a major problem, her life and her views will be of great interest to anyone interested in the conditions in which India excels irrespective of whether someone in the US or Europe thinks so.

Bhargava’s excellence, deserving though it is, is on the other hand purely academic. It contains no imprints of the experience of persevering in India except perhaps in a theoretical sense (caveat: I haven’t read the book, and likely won’t). But he is celebrated as a “famous Indian” anyway, just the way Ramakrishnan is.

Taking recourse through Western recognition also risks false positives: celebrating work that a White Man has expressed interest in, even when it is actually par for the course in its context. Here’s a good example.

Second: Nandy’s and Chaki’s choices have excluded not just these people but the real change-makers in India, the people working on the ground, with communities, and who often go unnamed (until they’re arrested on specious charges). It is not hard for me or any other English-speaking urbanite who reads The Economic Times to find out what Bhargava’s, Mukherjee’s or Rushdie’s views are. But it’s very hard to hear from the community workers, above and beyond the skewed incentives that keep the mainstream media’s gaze looking away from them – including perhaps The Economic Times‘s, given the glowing review.

I’m not sure if it’s the paucity of homegrown champions who have won international  – especially Western – recognition, but something about it, an Indian name and even the slightest hint of brown skin has people – at least the upper-caste middle and upper class readers of the English media – sitting upright, paying attention and clutching at the pride straws. But when the recognition has a more local and caste-just flavour, the interest vanishes.

At a time when pandering to the aspirations of just this group makes for good business, and when such business increasingly controls what we don’t see or read or hear, it’s important to define our heroes properly and make sure we keep them in our sights.

A tribute to Tolkien

Instead of dismissing it with a gracious modesty, I’m going to shamelessly record for posterity that The Master quoted in Anand Venkateswaran’s essay on J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hindu Literary Review is yours truly.

The full text of my quote to Anand, who is also a close friend and my first ever editor in journalism, is pasted below. It was in response to his comment that writing about Tolkien felt like he was engaging in something way above his pay-grade.

If Tolkien only wanted to demonstrate his linguistic fluency, and not something that would be consumed by the “masses” for decades after his time, he wouldn’t have written his stories the way he did.

Some of us walk away in awe of his mastery of the culture and languages of the worlds he created. Others see it as the ultimate story of friendship, and some others of good versus evil. Like all forms of fiction, his writing is shot through with tremendous political issues and subtle forms of discrimination. But the greatest thing about fantasy fiction, distinct from all other forms, is that it allows us to create new worlds completely divorced from our own, and lets us make of it what we want to. Fantasy fiction is fractal. There’s no point being intimidated by it.

At the moment I said it, I was quite proud of the way I’d phrased “fantasy fiction is fractal”. But I realised later that what I was really trying to say wasn’t coming through. It would’ve been better phrased as “fantasy replicates itself through readers’ interpretations of it”. However, none of this subtracts from the fact that Anand’s is a wonderful essay and tribute to a writer and inventor without whom fantasy fiction as we know it today wouldn’t exist.