Desicritics Interviews

Rendezvous with Prof. P. Lal, the Bhisham Pitamah of Publishing Indian Writing in English

Vivek Sharma — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:59:20 EDT

I visited Kolkata and met the legendary poet, translator, writer, professor, publisher: P. Lal. For the poet who has known over half a century worth of writers, and has been a cornerstone of Indian writing in English, a meeting with a novice like me may not appear anything special. But it was a very special forty-five minutes for me, and my post is a testimonial about the meeting. To call him Bhisham Pitamah of Publishing Indian Writing in English is to recognize the role he has played in nurturing several generations of writers, and to pay tribute to his effort at translating every verse of Mahabharata.

P. Lal, or Prof Lal (as he is affectionately called) is a month away from starting his eighth decade. In the last fifty years, he has launched innumerable poets and writers, who have found their niche in the world of celebrity (or in many cases obscurity). Be it Agha Shahid Ali or Vikram Seth or Keki N Daruwala or Pritish Nandy or AK Ramanujan or Chitra Bannerjee Devakurni or Kamala Das, their story begins with Writers Workshop imprint. P. Lal runs a small publishing "room", from where book acceptances are issued, and where 500 copies of hand-bound books are shipped, each carrying exquisite calligraphy, which is the hallmark of WW & Prof. Lal. As a publisher, his enterprise has incredible 3500 titles already to his credit. As a translator, he has collected and translated nearly every verse of Mahabharata. The epic is much much longer and richer than Collected Works of Shakespeare or both Iliad and Odyssey and requires a wisdom of language and culture, spread over three thousand years and more. The Writers Workshop has survived so long by the personal funds and efforts of one man, who continues to inspire writers like me. Now before I talk about the meeting, let me repeat the story of how I got the Writers Workshop imprint. I hope many more will follow this route and stay thankful for the existence of WW.

I first wrote to Prof. Lal in December, 2008, asking him if I could send in a manuscript. The response was prompt "yes" and I sat down and compiled 63 poems into Saga of a Crumpled Piece of Paper. After sending in the manuscript, I was ready to wait for months, and yet the acceptance came within a few days. Then began the process of revisions on my part. In November 2005, I was fortunate to walk into the office of Thomas Lux, a poet in residence at Georgia Institute of Technology and in next three years, he taught me the importance of craftsmanship, skill, reading and revision. When my book was accepted, my Gurudev and friend, Thomas Lux, offered to write an introduction. In the MIT convocation this year, a speaker said that an intellectual and a scientist must possess traits of 'generosity' and 'curiosity ': Gurudev has taught me both with regards to poetry. Gurudev Lux showed generosity when I was a student, as well as in the introduction for my book (I christened him Gurudev, both because he is my mentor and because I could not follow the American practice of calling him Tom). Within a few months of submitting the revised manuscript, I had galley proofs with me, and the book will be ready by Fall this year.

While Prof. Lal and I exchanged emails, I was aware of the central role played by him (and Nissim Ezekiel) in nurturing Indian poets writing in English. For example in the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, (a comprehensive anthology representing 70 poets, edited by Jeet Thayil), there are several poets who have had Writers Workshop imprint for either their first book or for many of their books. Three Indian Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, Don Moraes and A. K. Ramanujan by Bruce King examines how Indian heritage and Western education create a new voice in English, and the anthology edited by Jeet Thayil introduces us to a broad spectrum of work in English, where a Western language carries Indian hues, smells, sounds and mystery. The contribution of Writers Workshop is not in how many books it sells, but in how it has cradled the voices that would have vanished without reaching us. Given the contributions made by Writers Workshop, Calcutta to Indian English, I feel it is an honor and a privilege to begin my career as writer here. When I decided to travel to India, I wrote to Prof Lal, asking him if I could come and meet him. He sent me a phone number, and I packed my bags in Himachal and traveled 2000 km more to meet him.

I was so excited about meeting him that I just landed up at his door. I was asked by the gatekeeper to return home, and told that Prof. Lal does not meet anyone without an appointment these days. I called Prof. Lal and learned that he was quite sick, was on a strict medical regime. He was getting blood transfusions done but he offered to meet me next evening. The next day, I showed up at his door half an hour before the appointed time, and entered the hallowed publishing "room", the grand library-like "office" of Prof. Lal. Since I am quite forgetful and I took no notes, I will paraphrase the essence of our conversation. (I shall not say what he said about my writing, he was quite generous, and I respect him for being patient and inspiring to youngsters like me). Fittingly we started to talk about Mahabharata.

Prof. Lal asked me if I knew of an English word that has two opposite meanings. I couldn't think of any, though he said 'cleave' has been used in context of being removed and sticking to something. Then he said in Sanskrit words can assume two different meanings quite easily. In the end of Mahabharata, Mahrishi Vyas asks that why can't man understand the path of 'arth', 'kaam', 'dharma' and 'moksha'? Prof. Lal asked me what these words meant. He explained "arth" has two meanings: first one is "essence" or "meaning" or "the fundamental understanding" (of self, and of world). But the alternate meaning is "money" or materialistic gain. We all pursue "arth", but usually the materialistic one. 'Kaam' can be associated with 'gandharva' or with 'kaamdeva', with 'love' or with 'lust', and most fail to go from 'lust' to 'love' or get trapped in cycle of 'lust'. Same for 'dharma' (often mistranslated as religion): it has a connotation which is 'spiritual', requires performance of duties and responsibilities that are harmonious with spirituality. Other meaning is "ritual", where the "show", the 'act' takes prominence. Of course, the great bane of us Hindus is that we forget the spiritual aspect, and over emphasize the ritual part. (In this context, the story of Nachiketa from Katha-Upanishad is quite telling: when the young son questions his father about the parting with worthless cows and animals, rather than giving alms of things dear to himself). The final goal of 'Moksha', also has two connotations: the first one of "detachment'' or "renunciation": freedom from "kaam" (lust), "krodh" (anger), "moh" (love or attachment), "lobh" (greed) and "irshya" (jealousy). It is a hard goal. The other one is of "escape", which is what many people take it to be. The translation from Sanskrit texts requires such subtle understanding, and hence is hard for people, especially foreigners and for students, to appreciate the "arth" or essence of complex, nuanced arguments.

Prof. Lal than told me another anecdote about how Yudhistar wanted to commit suicide after the battle of Mahabharata was over and he saw that the land was full of dead warriors and widespread destruction. Then being "dharmaputra" (Son of Dharma) he went to his foster father, Vidur, who represented Dharma itself (through his wisdom and deeds). Vidur asked Yudhisitar to first find out the similarity between "nadiya" (river), "stree" (female), 'taruvar' (tree) and "prithvi" (earth), and then make his decision. Yudhisitar came back, and said he understood. Prof. Lal asked me if I knew what the similarity was. River, earth, tree, and women, continue to provide even if they are abused, they carry on living even after destruction, they bring forth fruit and children and bear all the abuse with fortitude. To carry on in face of adversity and destruction is another facet of lesson imbibed in Mahabharata. I told him that I had heard about another anecdote about Yudhisitar visiting Bhisma to resolve these matters, and I had read Dinkar's verses about it. Prof. Lal smiled and said that is in Shanti Parva: the last part of Mahabharata, the section is finishing work on.

But the lessons in life and Mahabharata is always for the one who seeks an understanding. As Prof. Lal continued, he asked me why only Arjuna saw the "Viraat" Krishna (his grand form, with all times, all beings, all galaxies and universes, seen to be emerging from him and vanishing into him). The armies of Pandavas and Kauravas sat there, did not notice a thing. Yet Arjun went through a long deliberation as if, and this constitutes the Bhagavad Gita. 'Nar'-'Narayan', first is Nar (Man), then Narayana (God); first 'Jishna', then 'Krishna'. Why is Krishna only a charioteer, if he is the God, and why is Arjun in the doer, the driver, the decider seat? Why is Krishna, the all knowing God, not doing anything? Was Krishna just a voice in Arjun's head? Doesn't this mean that God watches as man does his actions? Why does Krishna advice Arjuna to kill Karna when Karna gets off his chariot to pull a wheel out of the mud? Why does Arjun commit this sin, why does he need to obey Krishna's advice? What is Krishna? The consciousness or mind or thinking that makes Yudhistar lie, say that Ashwathama has died and abet in the murder of Dhronacharya, his own teacher, his own Guru? Who is the doer? Who is the thinker? After all the arguments put forth in Gita, the pacifist Arjuna, says P. Lal, makes the wrong choice, and kills his own brethren. In heaven, when Yudhistar and Arjun get there, they see Duryodhana has a grander seat than them. When they ask why it is so, they learn, that they actually fought the war for profit, for their selfish desire to rule, and not because they were on the side of dharma (Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, in Rashmirathi and Kurushetra argues that once war begins, 'dharma' is impossible to follow, and so even if war has a just cause, every warrior ends up leaving his dharma). Prof. Lal smiled and said, there are lot of dilemmas and questions left open or raised in Mahabharata. It is a grand work, and if you get lost in it, there is no coming back. (I told him I want to do a translation some day as well). We talked about the versions he had used, about Gita Press Gorakhpur, who do a commendable job in making all the ancient texts available at a low cost. He also said, what I had seen, that the Gita press censors out any mention of meat eating (by Pandavas, for example) and of sexual matters (in highlighting which some Western translators take extraordinary pleasure in). He said, like many other versions, his interpretations will not be perfect, and he cannot hope to reach the perfect version: but he seeks a complete version.

Then came the question of what I planned to do in life. I said that I want to continue my life of a researcher and keep writing in spare time. We talked about how English is still a foreign language when Indian emotions need to be expressed. Prof. Lal said that Indians are pastoral, and are more straightforward than a typical Westerner: with faith in simpler ideals and idols. To say something in an understated way is English style, not Indian. Irony is not what an Indian poet must excel in, for irony falters in an Indian context, and reduces us writers to poor mimics of Western writers. To say what we feel, requires a greater effort in English; there has to be touch of reverence, there has to be pastoral simplicity. We need to go beyond the established norms of Western writing in English to do a proper justice to the thoughts, traditions, practices, and emotions of this subcontinent. Prof. Lal said he found English particularly inadequate in capturing the multilayered connotation of shalokas or cantos of Mahabharata. We talked about how most of the famous fiction writers from India, who write in English, are urban elites, somewhat disconnected from the rural India, as well as from poor and middle classes in cities and small towns. I hope to continue writing about this underrepresented section of India, for I grew up in small towns and spend a large part of my vacations in villages. We agreed that if I stayed on in United States, it will be hard for me to stay unaffected by the Western style and Western thought process and write honestly, without irony or suspicion about Indian themes. Yet we agreed, it is sometimes by staying away from our land and language that we begin to understand ourselves better. It is through poetry that we understand that which we might not know otherwise.

The fifty minutes I spent with Prof. Lal, each minute for a year of Writers Workshop, filled me with a satisfaction that one feels after visiting a temple he has only heard about. My personal story as a published poet is on its first page, and as I walked out of the "Writers Workshop", I knew that if and when I'll visit the more celebrated publishing houses in future, I'll never feel the reverence and gratitude I felt in presence of the grand old man of Indian Writing in English. I left thinking that it is easy for us to focus on our individual careers, but it requires a substantial will to carry on an enterprise like Prof. Lal has done for five decades. In a few minutes, I found a rickshaw and retreated into the crowded lanes of Kolkata.

Novice Interpretation of Dreams

Suresh Naig — Sat, 7 Feb 2009 05:12:35 EST

Do dreams have meanings? This single question had generated many answers in the past and I am sure many more are in the queue. Many a time a single dream would throw different meanings, and all the meanings might appear right. I started reading many books to understand my dreams, but the more I read the more I was confounded and I solicited the views of many learned pundits to decipher my dreams.

Had it not been for the recurrent dream, I would have stayed happy like all my other friends, singing duets with Hemamalini and Waheeda Rehman, around a tree. My dream was like a cardiologist’s expression of a certain heart condition- "regularly irregular", in haunting me.

For a very long time, I used to get up in the middle of a night, soaked in sweat. I used to dream an elephant chasing me and my feet stuck in ground like an automobile stuck in slush, not in a position to move. By the time the elephant comes menacingly close to me, I used to get up from the bed soaked in sweat. The dream was recurrent for two reasons, primarily because of my fear of the huge animal and secondly, not even once I had allowed the dream to complete, by waking up in the dead of night. Taking pity on me, a wise man in our neighbourhood, who was respected for his divine disposition, advised me to visit a local Ganesha temple regularly for 21 days to rid of my haunting and incomplete dream. Closing his eyes in trance, he pronounced that I had left a vow unfulfilled in my earlier birth to Lord Ganesha, which gets reminded in this birth through the haunting dream.

My visits to the Ganesha temple had to be abandoned in less than two weeks, since the regularity of my elephantine dream increased with my regular visits to the temple. The wise man was very creative like all soothe Sayers, he declared, ‘God wants your previous karma to linger for some more time and that’s why you could not complete your 21 days visit to the temple’, which I believed for a long time, until I came across a well read person with a scientific bent of mind, who believed little in God and very little in previous births.

He narrated the famous dream of Singer, which was instrumental in perfecting the sewing machine. He said, ‘Singer had perfected everything other than the needle for the sewing machine. He was confused as how to mount the needle in sewing machine, which had a hole at its hind portion. One night he dreamt, that he lost his way in a forest and surrounded by aborigines. He suddenly woke up and got an answer for his pressing problem, because he saw all the aborigines were carrying spears, with a hole in the front.’ My session stopped with him as abruptly as it started, from his very first proclamation. He told me with an air of superiority, ‘all your dreams, I am sure would have been only in black and white and never it was colourful.’ He had only reproduced what he had imbibed from many books and had it not been for the timing, he would have succeeded in convincing me.

Only the previous night than his pronouncement, I had dreamt Rakhi attired beautifully in a pink coloured saree confusing me sufficiently, since that saree was the favourite of the most favourite girl in our neighbourhood. As I grew in age my fear transformed to inquisitiveness, to find the climax of my dream which was prolonging like the never ending TV serial, but to no avail. The dream had abruptly stopped, queerly coinciding with my marriage. However I could not muster enough courage to discuss the haunting dream and the timing of its culmination, to my healthy wife who always considered an hour-glass figure as unhealthy.

There was one dream which turned out profitable for me, due to an innocent interpretation by a wealthy aunt of mine. When I narrated a phenomenal dream of mine, of visiting a temple in a wooded area on a river bank, and curiously worshipping the presiding deity carved out of an onion, my aunt became emotional and said that her family deity, “Marthanda Bairava”, who is fond of accepting onion as offering, had blessed me through my dream. That dream was phenomenal, as it bestowed on me a sizable inheritance from her, but the real reason for that dream was due to my unusually high quantity of raw onions ingested during dinner from a Marwari Bhojanalya and going to bed without brushing.

Interview: Yogita Limaye, CNN-IBN Reporter, on Mumbai Attacks

Aditya — Sat, 6 Dec 2008 07:05:29 EST

It's an epidemic of sorts now. It struck again. It lasted for 60 hours. Mumbai bled.

As viewers stitched to the TV set like umbilical chords, it was psychologically draining to watch the footage of Hemant Karkare readying himself to take control before he was shot dead with two other ranking cops Salaskar and Kamte, to see the deserted CST station daubed in red, to stare at the burning Taj as the our men with woefully inadequate infrastructure brought it to an end. Amid the chaos, journalists became household names whose voice, sometimes desparate, sometimes hopeful blared through our TV sets. While some sensationalised it, a few others acted responsibly.

Yogita Limaye is one such reporter from CNN-IBN who clocked two nights straight near the Taj running relentlessly on adrenalin and in this podcast, she gives us an on-ground perspective of the events that unfolded

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Unearthing of Indian Writing in English: Conversation with Christopher Rollason and Ludmila Volná

Nilanshu Agarwal — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:31:58 EST

Dr Christopher Rollason is a British national living in France. He obtained his Ph.D. from York University (England) in 1988, with a dissertation on Edgar Allan Poe. For eight years up to 1987 he was a member of the Department of Anglo-American Studies at the Faculty of Letters of Coimbra University (Portugal). Dr Rollason has worked in recent years in various contexts -- institutional contacts, conferences, publications, etc. with the following universities: Surrey and Manchester (England), Caen (France), Bologna (Italy), Vigo and Córdoba (Spain) San Marcos (Lima, Peru), and, Kakatiya University (Warangal), CIEFL (Hyderabad) and IIT Kanpur, all in India. In March 2006 he was a Visiting Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi). He is a member of AEDEAN (the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies). He is also a founder member of the Spanish Association for Interdisciplinary Studies on India (AEEII).

Dr Christopher Rollason has published widely on Indian Writing in English, on authors such as Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh and Manju Kapur. He has edited and refereed for several Indian journals.
Dr Ludmila Volná has written her PhD thesis on the representations of India in Indian writing in English and teaches courses on IWE at Charles University in Prague. She conducts her research at IMAGER, a research group of the University of Paris XII and has published on Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Raja Rao, Anita Desai and others and extensively on R. K. Narayan. She has also presented her results as invited lectures and at international conferences in India, in the United States and in a considerable number of European countries.
Dr.Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal talks to these two Western scholars of Indian literature in a scholarly way. The interview focuses mainly on the issues of translation, relevance of IWE, changing phase of English Studies in India and several other general topics related to literature.

NKA: Where does poetry / imaginative literature originate from? Poetry comes as naturally to a poet as leaves to the branches. This instinctive activity can not be forced on anyone. In a way, creative literature is the outpouring / vomiting of personal emotions. Wordsworth had held the same view: 'poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' Do you agree to this assumption? Or do you consider the role of intellect/ logic in the modification of the literary text more important? Or, should a poet adopt 'the middle path', choosing the best of both the worlds?
LV: Poetry certainly comes naturally to the poet as an outpouring of his/her emotions, it is a 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' But this is not necessarily in contradiction with the workings of intellect. In my opinion the character of the creation has also much to do with the intellectual background of the creator. But this is not to say that in the process of creation the intellect of the author has to be put to work consciously. Rather, an imaginative piece of writing can simply reflect the internal make-up of its author (which includes emotions and intellect) in a less or more complex manner and can be entirely spontaneous.
CR: I suggest the middle path. As I see it, the lyric poem – images, emotions, sensations – emanates from the unconscious. Yet at the same time the poem is a piece of made work, a construction in language. Edgar Allan Poe made this "madeness" of the poem enormously clear in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition", which explains in rational terms how he wrote went about writing "The Raven", a poem of desire and death steeped in unconscious material. The poet I see, then, as both seer and maker.

NKA: If creative literature is the release of the inner emotions, is not Indian Writing in English marred by creative and intellectual dishonesty? Poetry, an instinctive adventure, emerges at the level of highest emotional upsurge. And the language of that instinctive pattern cannot be an alien one. I think the deepest emotions are represented in literature of one's native language. If something has touched an author really, he can express it only in his first language. A foreign or second language is concerned with our mental wellbeing; it is not something emotional. Suppose my hand is burnt, what will be the medium of my expression? Poetry can flourish in one's language of emotional make-up. So, if an Indian English writer is creating poetry in English, how can it be spontaneous? How can he say that he is following the tradition of sage Valmiki, in whom poetry emerged without the slightest whiff of artificiality on seeing the killing of the Kraunch birds?
LV: First, let me say that I entirely agree with Raja Rao's statement that the English language is not alien to the Indians. It ceased to be alien as you, Indians, have appropriated it in the same way (and perhaps even more so) as anyone else who is not a native speaker of English and has come to work with/in English. I am persuaded that a second language can become a means of expressions for emotions, even very deep emotions, and I believe that it greatly depends on the individual poet's situation, attitudes and preferences. For example it may depend on to what kind of experience or feelings the given language is closely related for that person. Here I am speaking from my own experience. Being a Czech native speaker living in France and working in English, I feel as most natural for myself to speak Czech to the Czechs and even to my cats while when writing poetry (including that on my cats) I can only do it in English, or occasionally in French - when it comes to a phenomenon characteristically related to my life in France. Never in Czech. Apart from that, I would only very reluctantly accept to write a scholarly paper in Czech. I simply do not feel like it. That does not mean that I do not love my mother tongue, on the contrary, I feel most intimate towards it. Nevertheless in spite of it I cannot help writing, both creative writing and scholarly papers, almost exclusively in English.
CR: There are IWE writers who have had all of their education in English and who describe English as coming more naturally to them than their native language. Surely the point is to write in the language one masters best. Then there are also bilingual poets such as Jayanta Mahapatra, who has published in both English and Oriya.

NKA: Indian English literature is soaked in Indian myths and traditions. The authors use numberless mythological references. My question is: whom do the Indo-Anglians target as their readers? Due to the over-use of Indian references, sometimes they may become unintelligible to the western readers. How will a westerner understand the allusions from classical Indian mythology and native ethos? I am citing few verses from Sarojini Naidu's poetry to explicate my point:

To Indra's golden-flowering groves
Where streams immortal flow,
Or to sad Yama's silent Courts
Engulfed in lampless woe,
Where'er thy subtle flute I hear
Beloved, I must go! (qtd. in Iyengar 218)

Even, Indians cannot be the readers of this type of literature, as most of the Indians are not well-read in the English language. In a way, the readership of Indo-Anglian literature is very limited. It has become a literature of the elite class. It is accessed only by those Indians who are fortunate enough to get the English education. So, is not this literature a mere plaything in the hands of the upper-class people, who use it as a thing of fashion or snobbery? Is it not far removed from the masses? Is it not read only by a society of drawing room idlers casually?
LV: Let me start my answer with a question: do the Indian authors writing in English NEED to target some particular group of readers? If they use myths while writing in English it is perhaps because they cannot do otherwise, the myths are a part of their culture. Their works are spontaneous creations which come out of the innermost wells of their beings. That precisely makes the charm of their works, Indianness mediated through the English language! It is the task of the reader to try and understand as much as possible the work s/he is reading, not the task of the writer to make his/her work one hundred percent accessible at all costs. It is an acknowledged fact that the degree of 'intelligibility'/understandabilty of a literary work of art depends on the general culture and the education of the reader. And does a good work of fiction or a poem not become a means of instruction itself, especially within Indian culture? So the Western reader gets not only entertainment but also information on India and the Indian reader receives perhaps a stimulus to learn English better. Let then the Western reader become acquainted with Indian culture and the Indian reader become literate in English. And why, after all, should the Indian literary works written in English not be translated into Hindi and Indian regional languages, especially if they are translated into other non-Indian languages?
CR: There can certainly be a problem of accessibility of IWE works to non-Indian readers who are not already immersed in Indian culture, Raja Rao's "The Serpent and the Rope" would not be immediately comprehensible to all and sundry non-Indians. Still, the reader can take a text's Indian cultural references as connoting a general "Indianness" without seeking to know each and every denoted meaning. Meanwhile some Indian classical texts – the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana – and hence some classical references - are much better known abroad than others. In the Sarojini Naidu poem you quote, I myself recognize the Indra and Yama allusions, but admit that not all non-Indian readers will. Regarding Indian readers of IWE texts in India, let us not forget that English is the only language used in India that is of national reach. A Hindi text risks being understood by few in Tamil Nadu or Kerala: this is less true of an IWE text, since English is more widely understood in those states than Hindi. Nor do I think the pan-Indian English-speaking community is that small: the university-educated are too wide a group to be airbrushed away as "the upper class". It is also the case that an IWE text can be made available to non-English-speaking Indian readers in, say, Marathi or Malayalam translation. Cases in point are Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" and Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games".

NKA: What should be the language of one's creativity—one's native language or a second/alien one?
LV: For a large number of writers this would of course be the mother tongue but in principle it can be any language expressing by the means of which one feels at ease, that which does not feel alien.
CR: In most cases it will of course be one's first language. However, some people are genuinely bilingual and therefore free to choose.

NKA: What should be done to promote the literature in native regional languages?
LV: The translation work cannot be overestimated here. To translate between Indian languages and into English and other, non-Indian languages. As far as I know it has been the Sahitya Akademi's prerogative for several years to promote the former.
CR: Translate, translate, translate! Into English, into Hindi, and between Bengali and Tamil and all the rest. And into non-Indian languages too.

NKA: Are there sufficient translations of regional literary works into English? What do you think are the essential qualities of a translated literary work? How will you distinguish transcreation from transliteration?
LV: In fact there has been perhaps a surprisingly large number of works in regional languages translated into non-Indian languages. Not only into English but we find an impressive number of works being translated into French from Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil and other languages. And one can find translations from Hindi, Urdu and Bengali also in Czech, for example, not speaking of translations of classical Sanskrit works. Whether the number is sufficient is hard to say, of course the more the better. - A translation is always a kind of re-creation of the text, I believe. Not only should the translator try to be faithful to the original as much as s/he can, but also the work must be understood by the readers into whose language it is translated. So it is always a kind of compromise between the two. The scope for 'imaginative flight' of the translator is given by his capacity to find the most suitable expression in the language into which s/he translates.
CR: It is obviously vital to translate works from Indian languages, including Hindi, into English: the more the better! I should add (I live in France) that on the French book market there exist a surprising number of translated works from Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam etc. Most of these are directly rendered, i.e. not going through English. You can find them in the bookshops. This fact is insufficiently well known. It is thus not only a question of translation into English. A translated literary text needs to strike a balance between fidelity to the original and culture and accessibility to the host culture. Transcreation – I believe the concept has been particularly explored by P. Lal – differs from translation proper because it is a much freer process. It is in line with a long Indian tradition, as with the many different language versions of the Ramayana, most famously the Tamil version, which are retellings and not translations of Valmiki's Sanskrit narrative. However, a transcreation should be billed as such and not presented as a translation in the strict sense.

NKA: Can a translator always be faithful to the original? Sometimes, he deviates from the original. Do you grant such deviations to a translator? There is a typical dichotomy involved in a work of translation. On the one hand, a translator cannot digress from the subject. The other side of the coin is that if he does not deviate from the original and sticks to the text, where is the imaginative flight for him? A translator is chained by classical bondage of rules, customs and regulations. So, where is the scope for imaginative flights for a translator? Should a translator be subjective or objective?
LV: A transcreation is clearly not a translation and should be distinguished as such, it is what is in the Indian context also called 'a rendering.' A number of renderings of the classical Sanskrit texts into English have been done and quite often Indian writers have rendered their own works from their native language into English or vice versa, especially in the period of the beginnings of Indian writing in English.
CR: Transcreation and translation proper are not the same thing, and each has its advantages. The transcreator can be subjective: the translator proper needs to be objective.

NKA: What are the problems of Indian English criticism? What do you think are the major issues before Indian critics? Are these critics following the ancient Indian tradition of Rasa, Dhwani and Alamkara? Or are they playing 'the sedulous ape' to the western critical tools? Are there certain attempts to evolve an individual perspective, different from the ancient Indian aesthetics and western critical theory? There is an onslaught of theory from the West. Are the Indian critics able to maintain a separate identity? Who are the major contemporary Indian English critics, who have evolved a new and innovative approach in their critical works?
LV: Indian critics should follow their own way - which does not mean an absolute rejection of Western criticism. I feel, nevertheless, that they should also try to set the critical approaches relevant for Indian writing on Western critical circles and be critical towards any post-colonial theory which is subject to simplifications or distortions with regard to the specific features of Indian culture and literature. Indian critics should certainly not allow any kind of theoretical colonization. Theories like dhwani-rasa have not yet found their way into broader critical circles, on the other hand Indian writing in English has already its own well-established tradition of Indian critics, starting with Srinivasa Iyengar, Prema Nandakumar, or C.D. Narasimhaiah, and going on with names like Harish Trivedi, Vrinda Nabar, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Subhendu Mund, GJV Prasad, Nilufer Bharucha and many others, all of whose approach can be classified as a singular contribution to Indian English criticism.
CR: There are very significant names in Indian criticism – Harish Trivedi, GJV Prasad, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Gayatri Spivak – but how well are any of them known in the West outside the ambit of postcolonial studies, or perhaps tranalation studies? This said, surely Indian critics wishing to make their mark internationally would do best to master both Indian and Western points of view? Still missing is the Indian critic who will bring rasa theory to the outside world's attention as an alternative to Aristotelian perspectives.

NKA: What are your views about the English studies in India? English studies were introduced in India to colonize the minds of the Indians. It was used by the Empire to conquer the souls of the colonized people. About their determination to introduce the European literature in India, Lord William Bentinck declared that "the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India, and all funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed on English education alone." (qtd. Iyengar 27). In the light of the aforesaid facts, is it not proper to exclude certain colonial texts from the syllabi of English Studies in India? In their place, should we not introduce translations of certain classics of regional languages? It will be a sort of decolonization of English studies. I think the curriculum of English studies should consist of Literature in English language in place of Literature of England. Your views please.
LV: In my opinion the study of English in India should be given a place analogical to that which it occupies anywhere else. English studies are nothing more but nothing less either than English studies. If we study English then we should certainly include classical texts written in English and that is irrespective of the place where it is studied. It should include all literature written in the English language, certainly not just literature of England. Examples of what you call "certain colonial texts" should be, on the contrary, studied, I believe; not from a subordinate position but in the proper historical perspective, they should be studied by a 'decolonized mind.'
CR: It is usually said that Macaulay's "Minute on Indian Education" was aimed at imposing British perspectives on Indian minds. However, if you read that text closely you will find a subtext, namely that he does also advocate developing modern Indian languages – rather than Sanskrit or Arabic– with a view to those languages acquiring a scientific and technical vocabulary. The technology introduced by a colonial power can be reappropriated for national purposes post-independence. No-one in India suggests tearing up the railway lines simply because the British had them laid. Karl Marx predicted that teaching Indians western technology would ultimately lead to India reassuming its place as a great nation. Mulk Raj Anand in his novel "Untouchable" saw technology as liable to bring about social progress in India by liberating dalits from the most menial tasks. Meanwhile, the idea of "excluding" certain "colonial texts" from syllabi sounds risky. Shakespeare remains the most important writer in English and introduced more words into the language than anyone else. Kipling's "Kim" is still valuable as transmitting aspects of the colonists' idea of India. Edward Said found "Kim" redeemable. This said, there is anyway a growing tendency worldwide to teach "literatures in English" – British, US, postcolonial – rather than "English literature".

NKA: The MNCs are hiring a number of Indians. One requirement for entry into these organizations is fluency in English, but the problem is that the comprehension power of Indian students in the English language is very weak. Will it not be better to teach the students about the minutest intricacies of the language in place of lecturing on a number of irrelevant and colonial texts of England? What do you think?
LV: The only way to solve this problem is certainly to improve the quality of teaching of the English language as such. Learning English does not necessarily need to be a part of English studies, in other words, it is possible to learn good English without majoring in English studies. At the same time it is necessary to realize that "the minutest intricacies" of the language are conveyed precisely by the literary works of art.
CR: I think there are two separate issues here. It is not necessary for all professionals proficient in English to be English studies majors. One thing is service courses in English for those studying economics, technology, etc. Another is the content of degrees in English studies as such. Meanwhile, I do not accept the notion of literary studies as "irrelevant". Creative writing expands a language's boundaries and is a privileged means of access to, precisely, its "minutest intricacies".

NKA: What are your views about publication process in India? Publishers do not easily come forward to publish a new and budding author. Most of the times, they charge money from the poets / authors in place of giving them royalty. Similar is the case with certain journals. They also charge money in the form of subscription / membership. In this way, new and innovative approach to literature may be kept hidden from the eyes of the world. Please comment.
LV: The reluctance to publish a new and unestablished author is nothing specific to India. It is, more or less, the case anywhere else too. New authors and innovators are not always appreciated, theirs is not an easy lot. This is a sad, nevertheless generally valid reality.
CR: I am not in favour of the practice of asking authors or contributors for financial input into books and journals. I find it counterproductive.

NKA: Can electronic publication be an alternative to print publication? I think negatively about it. Publication on internet cannot replace print publication. One can easily get his material published on internet. But the real issue is – whether the people take that matter seriously. Readers go through blogs cursorily. How many genuine readers do bother to indulge in the text on internet? It is not suitable for serious academic research. What do you think about all this?
LV: We are perhaps still more used to printed publications. Nevertheless, while it is true that one can publish whatever one wants on his/her own blog, there are very serious internet journals published from prestigious universities where it is not so easy to get published. The advantage of these journals is of course that they are accessible to a large number of readers and thus academic research can benefit from them. Very often the readers and the authors can come into direct contact via e-mail. On the other hand there is a large number of print journals or other publications which are of poor quality. It is then necessary to have the criteria for serious academic research in mind and to act selectively both with regard to the printed matter and to the internet material.
CR: There is in fact a large amount of serious academic material online. Today, the bibliographies to articles reflect this. What worries me is that a lot of academic journals are paying sites. This I find contrary to the free circulation of knowledge, a principle vital to the Internet which also, I believe, corresponds to the Indian notion that knowledge exists to be shared.

Work Cited
Iyengar, K.R.S. Indian Writing in English. 5th ed. New Delhi: Sterling, 1985.

Deconstructing the Orthodox - C. P. Aboobacker in Conversation

Nilanshu Agarwal — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:22:06 EST

C .P. Aboobacker began writing poetry from early childhood. A man of leftist leanings, Aboobacker has so far published twenty three books of which five are collections of poems, two are collections of essays and one a translation of Joop Bersee's poems. The crown of his poetic achievement is The Old Earth, a collection of his English poems, edited by Joneve Mc Cormick (Chief Editor of Soul To Soul) and published by Monsoon Editions in 2008. A member of the associations like Calicut University Syndicate and Progressive Writers’ And Artists’ Organization, Aboobacker was selected as the best poet of the week four times by Poetry Super Highway.com. His best poetry is, to borrow an expression from the great Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, “the criticism of life”. The poem ‘The Corpses’, published in Kritya, exhibits the dismal and gloomy scenario of the contemporary world: “Every corpse once had a life/ Once warm and loving, and hating”. This lyrical expression is sure to touch the innermost chords of the reader’s heart. Aboobacker appears to be in agreement with the great War poet, Wilfred Owen, notable for war poems like ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ and ‘Strange Meeting’. Owen made clear the aims of his poetry in his celebrated ‘Preface’. The famous statement of this leading poet of the First World War is: “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” Like Owen, Aboobacker too exhibits the naked horrors of the world in some of his poems. Despite this depiction of the miserable condition of life, Aboobacker is not a downright pessimist. The poems like ‘Bridge’ and ‘Love Manifesto’ reveal his faith in the survival of the human world, despite all the odds. In ‘Love Manifesto’, he optimistically declares: “There is a bounty beneath every human relation/ A bounty not the evils spirits can steal away /Time and space cannot destroy it /It is the fragrance of sighs…”
This senior academician from the state of Kerala is also the editor of the literary ezine, thanalonline, which has carved a niche for itself by promoting literary activities of both established and emerging authors and poets. The editorials, written by him for this ‘flawless literary venture’ display his penchant for social, political and literary criticism of the highest order. He is associated with a number of social and cultural groups of the state. This enlightened scholar, poet, translator and editor talks to Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal about the origin of poetry in him, editing of thanalonline, literary translations, mode of literary communication and contemporary literary scene of Kerala in a highly polemical interview. This interview, in progress for several months, was finalized at The Calicut Literary Festival, 2008.

NKA: As editor of the online bilingual literary magazine, Thanalonline, what do you think, is the current status of creative writing in India?
CPA: My jurisdiction is not India as editor of <a href="http://www.thanalonline.com">Thanalonline</a>. It is the whole world. I find poetry is widely read and for this vast reading, new poems are composed by talented writers. Each poem I receive is different. Indian poets are generally averse to electronic publishing. This is not a generalization; Dr. Rati Saxena, one of the great poets modern India has produced, publishes her poems mainly in electronic media. She deals with love, womanhood, time, and what not. Every line is carefully written, every line is impregnated with a passion not seen elsewhere. Her mountains, Udaipur Lake and many other poems such as sea poems etc. give reader a pleasure veiled by a smooth sorrow. But we know while reading she is writing from the depths of sorrow. But she is different from other writers. There are other Indian writers-- Anna Warne is there:

I am held captive /I cannot contain this flow/ This boundlessness Overwhelms me Drowning me in love.

Or writing from the eternal background of fear of war or war itself, Farideh Hassan Zadeh is there:

Like the bloody sound of alarms, /Like the roaring anti-aircraft rounds, /Like the falling bombs and rockets, /which turn the ruins and ashes into eternal reality; /I feel night by night more real and old.

How could life be a beautifully knit web for a mother who lost her child in war? And there are many more poets; only thing is that I cannot limit them to the borders of a country. In " A silly fish poem", Fide Erken from Turkey writes:

"You don't care about life's troubles,/ However, I don't want to be in your place./ Do you know the poet, Fide, here?/ No she doesn't hold any importance to you. /I wish I hadn't known her either. But it happened once, twice, a million times..."

Poets these days are like this; they don't want to be very important, they just want to say what they want to. Poets want to reveal to the world that men and women live, although in suffering, although betwixt war and terror. Kate Bernadette Benedict writes:

By this walking we know we live.
Do our bowed heads still venerate?
We cannot say; nor do we speak of bleeding or any particular lack.

It is existence. Man does exist. In calamities as well as in atrocities; in wars; as settled ones or as refugees, man does exist. The poet tries to picture the perseverance of mankind. They go back to Rumi, again they attempt at the universal fusion, just as Kazim Ali from Iran does. Rumi was not rotating round the sun (Shams) he discovered at the streets, but the sun within himself; the poets of today know it. One day Shams went out of the reach of Rumy and never returned; Rumy began his search and only in the very last he found out the sun within. Poets are like that; they reach the truth ultimately, after ages of bleeding, after epochs of searching. The desires and visions of modern poet are different. They are ready to suffer for the world, or along with the world, as they know the world is full of suffering just as Buddha had realized it two and a half millennia ago.

I want to build a monument
To the farmer who drove his tractor into the fountain
You say as we walk past.

Melissa Tuckey is merely translating this feeling in to modern language.

Jan Theuninck from Belgium, who also paints a lot, writes about human destiny:

“Like a shrine/ You lie / In the middle / Of the wood/ And warn / Of those/ Who preach peace/ And make war” .

The modern hypocrisy of statecraft cannot be better described and more concisely written.

I need not expand my answer anymore. It is a self evident truth that poetry does cover all senses and all sensibilities.

NKA: What is your primary criterion in the selection of a work of art?
CPA: My criterion? The only criterion is that a creation must have an appeal on me. I put myself in the place of a reader with no skill, with no awareness of what is strong or weak in a poem or work of art. If, then, the work of art appeals me, I publish it. Very often my learned friends have asked me why I have published X or Y. This is the answer. It appeals to my sense of aesthetics, which is a commonplace phenomenon.

NKA: Any special reason for choosing the title Thanalonline for your ezine? Please explicate the significance of this title in the contemporary world ethos, marred by blood-dimmed tide of violence and nasty bestial approach of the fellow human beings.
CPA: Thanal means shade in Malayalam. I chose this name for my residence also. Perhaps because I never have had the luck of experiencing it from anywhere, any place or any individual or group, either within the family or within my closet of friends. I have not had the experience of a peaceful life within my society. Strife prevails everywhere. I don't complain that it is anything new; it has been, it is and it will be the same. Man is pushed to very hot circumstances and told that it is warmth. Man is pushed to very cold climes and told that it is cool and calm. It is not a truth. Media everywhere give him/her only the most barbaric of emotions. Channels pollute him with over-hot or icy emotions. Thanal is a shade where you can stay for any length of time. It is neither too cool nor too hot. But it is not an emotionless region. It deals with love. It deals with hate. It also deals with salt and food.

NKA: Despite your being an ex-Professor of History, you have launched a literary ezine. What factors –external and internal—prompted you to indulge in this venture? How has your long academic sojourn over the years helped you in your role as editor of Thanalonline? Can one find the imprint of a teacher's psyche in your journal?
CPA: I don't think so. History, for me, was a choice of circumstances. I wanted to learn literature. Poverty and inability to go to distant colleges led me to learning history. Literature has always been my love. I have been writing poetry for the last fifty plus years. It is upto the readers and viewers to decide whether there is imprint of an experienced teacher in my ezine. I am not pedagogical. Still, I hold that I was a good teacher. This was mainly because of my love for poetry. And Dr. Nilanshu, do you find a teacher's psyche in thanalonline? Teaching is not just telling or lecturing something, I presume. It is love, it is communicating; communication is not possible without a strong bond; may be love, may be hatred. I have so far not been able to communicate with my spouse. She is a different cast. For her I am different cast. I don't mean pedagogy. I mean communication. We have been living together with some attraction to each other for the last thirty five years. So, existence without communication is possible. Why, then, should I teach anyone? I communicated with my students; they communicated with me. My audience is always a broader world.

NKA: What is the source of poetic inspiration in you? How does a poem emerge in you? Please make an emotional statement.
CPA: In fact I don't know. I write on political matters. Yes, I write political poetry. But I am particular that they should not be slogans. One can write slogans as slogans, not as poetry. I write about love, not love making. I write about nature, but not about farming or rock-cracking. I can write about farming, but not about good seed or bad seed. I am not bothered about the harvest; I just sow the seeds. Sowing is more important. I don't know how a poem sprinkles in me; it just happens; it begins as restlessness. I wrote all my poems when I was restless. This restlessness is the bliss at which my poems were born. I cannot name a particular thing as a source of inspiration; it might range from conjugal love or lost love; it might range from hunger to birth of the first man. I have more than a thousand poems in my exchequer of poetry.

NKA: In your poetry, you seem to emphasize the fact that happiness and pain are the two sides of the same coin in one’s life. In ‘Love Manifesto’, we have the deep philosophical expression:

Sun rises and sets the same moment
And your morn to me is the beginning of a sleep
World is always sleeping and waking up
…
My nightmare is daydream to you,
My moonlight is hot sun to you.
The above-mentioned lyrical lines appear to have an echo of Shakespeare’s expression in As You Like It:
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head…

What will you say about this? What are the other possible sources of such philosophical musings in your poetry?
CPA: I don’t think there is that much philosophical strains in the poetry referred to. Man always wakes up, always sleeps; why did I write it? It must be the impression of the normal astronomical phenomenon that earth is revolving round the sun. Poetry, I feel is really the creation of the reader. Poet sees and says ; reader sees deep and explains. I was perhaps supposing a communication with a person who was just opposite to my part of the earth. It would be night for him/her if it was day for me. Like this every part of the earth is different in time, in spite of our standard time zones. Nature is such that it is always vigilant and it is always dreamy; I am afraid that that dragging my lines to Shakespeare’s range would be a little arbitrary. Let us put a poet where he is, not upon the heights he cannot claim to reach.

NKA: What is the significance of symbols in your poetry? For example in the poem ‘The Bridge’, mark the following lines:

A bridge can connect all creatures,
Not merely two humans.

Besides, there are several other symbols in your poems. Do you give more importance to these symbols than to the direct communication? Some scholars believe that poetry should be simple, direct and without any symbols and ornamental flourishes. Whereas another group is of the view that the poet should indulge in the indirect communication of his ideals through symbols and myths. Where should we place Aboobacker as a poet? Is he a man of simple poetry or a poet of complex symbols? Or, is he a combination of both?
CPA: Poetry, to me , is an utterance of my soul. You may like it or not, it is the fact. Whatever, I cannot state through any other means of communication comes the poetry way. It can be a direct statement; it can be through images. It is in fact not symbol; it is an image; imagery is the language of poetry. The so-called direct poets also use images in plenty. Images are used not to complicate things and confuse the reader; they are used to simplify things, make things clear. But there is a contradiction between poetry and readers, rather between poet and what he/she has to communicate. He wishes to simplify things as clear as possible; he is not satisfied; so he uses images. It is a contradiction between poetry and simplicity. So, when the poet uses images, the like-minded reader gets to it fast. Yeah, there is one always there. It is like a love affair. But the like-minded reader knows it, he gets it, he develops the unrest on reading it. So, I am neither easy to read nor difficult to read; my poetry is neither simple nor complex; it is the reader who decides the fate of my poetry. And I say emphatically that it is not a critic who decides the destiny of my poetry. They can make and unmake poets for some time; but they cannot destroy poetry in anyone. But there is no reader when the poem is conceived or written; only poet and what he has to say; only images. Myths are part of culture. It is the hidden reality. Like poetry, you have to realize the meaning of the images within the myths.

NKA: The poems like ‘The Corpses’ and ‘Look at the Star’ are marked by naked realism. The imagery of the poems brings out the chaotic havoc of the modern civilization. I am quoting some lines from both the poems:
Every corpse once had a life
Once warm and loving, and hating too. (The Corpses)

Comely girl dead
Handsome boy shattered
Cupids shy away
Stars blink. (‘Look at the Stars’)
What parallels do you find in world literature of such depiction of the contemporary reality?
CPA: Oh, dear I am not a scholar. I have read a few poems; I try to read others. But when I write, I damn don’t think about other poems and poets. I am not a critic. I in fact despise them.They suck the blood of poets; dead and gone. The established poets do not want their praises. But they persist and write on them , not for the sake of poetry, but for advertising themselves that they are there to make poets. I pity them. No, I don’t want to deviate. Critics will be of great use if they begin to say that here is a new poet and he might be read. “Corpses” is in fact enthused by a description of post mortem by a doctor. It wishes to convey that every man would die and has had dreams and wishes, even if he were an Emperor. Life has an end; fulfill the end. You are to lie somewhere like a corpse. “Look at the star” is looking at the earth and life in it. Star is the path finder. It showed us the way to where Lord the Jesus was born. It must show us the way to understand what the world is upto. And for parallels, I don’t think there is any parallel to these poems. They are their own; they are composed as themselves.

NKA: I feel that beneath this depiction of the stark reality of the surrounding world, there is utter pain in your heart. What is the way out of this anarchy for the doomed civilization?
CPA: You be a poet; then you are doomed to be melancholy. It must be the basic nature of politicians, too. Melancholy is essentially incommunicable. You reign supreme in the realm of your melancholia. Well and good. How do you resolve it? You can sit idle and weep. Or you can sing aloud and calling upon the like-minded to shed away the anarchy, infamy and evils of the world you are pushed into. By being remaining melancholy, you tend to become and idle and aged prematurely. You should not succumb to lethargy and inactivity. It is a great war within your self. A poetic mind can never be idle and aged. Poets are the law makers. I overcome my pains with my poetry, and my poetry is a struggle. Some ignoramus might think, what is there in this writing a few lines to fight for? Long live the ignoramuses!

NKA: What is the significance of the nature imagery in a poem like ‘The Old Earth’? Do you find any association between man and nature?
CPA: I hope these lines from the poem will give you an answer to your question:

On the slopes of mountains/ Gasps of chasing dogs/ Die away to distances/ Singular rain embraces the earth/ Good looking Earth satiates/ Monstrous desires hidden in caves/ Continents and oceans/ Deltas and islands/ Rivers and lakes/ Gorges and deserts/ Embrace each other, entwined and curled/ Bring out the lust of earth./ This enchantress is unable to keep secrets/ They flow as if in a blue film.
Earth is the abode of man. He has been wolf and victim. He has been love and hate. And man is the only creature that drills into his own abode.
But man drills holes in the earth/ In search of diamonds and petrol/ Made of solar power/
It’s human rapine, sores and scabies/ Contracted from illicit connections/ Burst and flow/
Still this old woman waits for her lovers.

NKA: In such poems as ‘Writing’ and ‘Nature of Poet’, you discuss the act of poetic creation:
It is a gift from the depths
It is a sob rising from heart burns
On awareness of hunger! (‘Writing’)
The poem ‘Poet’ calls him ‘an enigma to all’. Will you like to share some ideas of those two poems with the readers of this interview?
CPA: In their peripheries these poems seem to be very subjective. These poems deal with things finite and infinite within the poet. Psyche of a poet is a realm in itself. It is inhabited by subjective and objective realizations. Objective realizations can be easily transmitted; subjective realizations cannot be. The first is visible to all, but the next is not. That is why it is next. Objective realizations are finite and subjective ones are infinite. The quoted lines from “Writing” have both the parts, infinite and finite: “ It is a gift from the depths/ it is a sob rising from the heart burns”, is the infinite part. It is subjective. But when I wrote “ awareness of hunger” , I knew it was transmitting the same feeling of objective reality you get from “Slaves Dream” or Oliver Twist. For the same reason, poet is always an enigma. Neruda wrote mostly on love and history; he is read so, but at the same time workers and peasants also have very fine streams there to drink from. Poet combines the objective and subjective, finite and infinite, material and spiritual.
NKA: Several of your poems have completely modern imagery. For instance, we may see the following lines from ‘Remembering Me’:

Now in this present
I lie alone, covered by chits of prescriptions
Like an AIDS infected syringe.
These lines remind the readers of Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Mark the following expression from Eliot’s poem:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…

Eliot justified this mingling of the opposites in his essay ‘The Metaphysical Poet’. While justifying the comparison between exceedingly diverse things, Eliot wrote, “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.” In a way, the just-mentioned essay is a justification of his poetic technique. Will you also like to justify/ validate the use of such imagery in your poetry?
CPA: I think my answer to this question is tacit in my last answer. What I have to add on the basis of your question is: I also live in the century when Eliot lived. War and carnage are increasing in unforeseen dimensions. New diseases are emerging. My question is just simple: people of Iraq fight and die for their country; why should the young ones from the USA fight and die in Iraq? If you are able to answer this question, you will get the answer to all questions of poetry in present day world. Let alone, the economic, political and cultural crisis that is haunting mankind.

NKA: Do you prefer writing literature in your mother tongue or in an alien language (English)?
CPA: I can write both in English and Malayalam. I realized it only recently. But very often the one I write in Malayalam is not easy to translate into English for me, and vice versa. But I must admit that I prefer to write in Malayalam as it is my mother tongue. I don't think man thinks in a language. Man thinks or imagines in ideas or materials. But I have seen many people feeling that they are thinking in one language and therefore it is very difficult for them to put their thoughts in another language. It is ignorance. Is language that important for the poet? There are a great many schools that argue all about poetry is language. Words, they say, are the philosophy, verses are the harvest; I don't think it is very important. In the most poetic moments I have neither words nor verses. I have my fill of restlessness. Language comes only secondary. English or Malayalam, poetry is the primary thing; and, here also, poetry is preceded by the life lived, nature sighted, dreams hallucinated- in short poetry precedes language, but poetry is preceded by life. Language is a tool; it is not the soul.

NKA: What should be done to promote regional/ vernacular literatures?
CPA: I don't know. I am not a linguist. I feel in Indian languages vocabulary should be exchangeable. Many are indeed exchangeable today. For this one has to see the words common in all languages first; then one has to discover the synonyms used in every language which has a similarity to the one in another language. First of all, I give the following example: Amma. It means mother. Almost all the Indian languages use a similar word for Amma. Next I give the following example: sirassu. It means the head. It must have a Sanskrit origin. In Hindi I assume it is "sir". Malayalam word for it is Thala. But when students are given synonyms for Sirassu, the word Seersham is used. These and like-words could be codified. A language flourishes when it is easy to use and when it has a good vocabulary to express all human relations, all nature and universe, all emotions and thoughts as well. For example even English has no equivalents for certain local language words: Malayalam has a word Aangala. It means brother in relation to sister. Madhavi can have an Aangala, but Madhavan cannot have. Its opposite gender is Pengal, sister in relation to brother. Ammavan is the brother of the mother and Ilayachan is the younger brother of the father. In English there are only brother, sister, and uncle. This is an asset of regional languages.

NKA: Are you planning a translation of your Malayalam writings into English? What do you think are the salient features of a good literary translation?
CPA: I am not always successful in translating my works into English. I can write in English. Most of my translations are from English to Malayalam. I have translated nearly 15 books from English to Malayalam. Now I am engaged in translating the famous book on Indian History The Wonder that was India by A. L. Basham. I have translated Irfan Habib, Osho and many others. The Wonder is a challenge. My greatest challenge was the translation of sixty poems by Joop Bersee of South Africa. It is a wonderful work of translation. I don't know whether the academic world admits this. If they do not, it is their loss. And about translation: How do you translate? You translate a book after fully understanding a book. You must be fully aware of the text. Otherwise you would not have continuity of the standard. Then, you will have to decide that no damage to the original text should be made. How? To forget the exact words in the original words; only remember the concept in the paragraph; then you write in you own words. There are many schools of translation that think the original book could be interpreted in a translation. It will be a guide, not a translation! You have no such rights as interpreting. We have to adhere to the text. You can use techniques that will help you infect the concepts in the original in your language.

Some of my works are translated into English. I have collected them in a book: The Old Earth. But all poems in The Old Earth are not originally in Malayalam. But I failed in translating many works. I wanted to do my poem Anandaram( And After) or Bhoomiyude Kannu( Eye of the earth) or Katal( The sea), or Unmadathinteyum Swasthyathinteyum ezhu raathriakal( seven nights of madness and calm ) etc. Unfortunately I could not translate them.

NKA: Contemporary society is terrorized by the shameless mockery of human values on all sides. Can literature fill this vacuum?
CPA: I see this in two perspectives: 1. Many incidents show that there is a mockery of human values. 2. Mockery of human values is brought to human notice by the growth of media. Let us explain the first. We have been discussing it. People everywhere complain of mockery of values. It happens. There are several reasons. Man expects much; but he gets very least. This is the main reason. And who pollutes our values? The so-called messengers and worthies of good are doing it! Channels have a role. USA is exporting its sex empire to the vast millions in the third world countries. Channels and cinema always try to incite people to violate all values. Crime is glorified. Anti-heroes win. It is Asoka the great that won; he was the aggressor, and the king of Kalinga is nowhere. Why? He failed; he was the leader of the vanquished. USA is dictating, not Iraq; aggressors and the victors dictate values; man is not an ignoramus to respect dictations. Recently Russia attacked some place in Georgia; USA was the first to question it in the name of international values! It is not mockery of values; it is the mockery of the mockery of the values. It is there. Now we find a young lover clasping the hands of his spouse and complain: Oh, these youngsters! How dare them! Our rulers are ready to sell out our country to USA disregarding the fact that we have thorium, which can be cultivated to uranium233. Time and again, our rulers say that buying nuclear fuel would solve the problem of energy; they conceal the most obvious facts before the students of nuclear physics! Could we expect the youngsters to be esteeming the values the elders made for them? On the one side, rulers sell the country; on the other side a love affair is dubbed as disregard of values. Which is what?

Secondly, I must confess that this complaint has always been there. I remember, some fifty years ago, my parents used to complain that values are disregarded by my generation. I was one among the value-breakers. I cropped my hair to an immoral length. Calvinists had punished women for arranging their hair to an immoral height; they have prescribed punishment for children for beating the parents. Not gown up children! Just children! The harems of the monarchs of the old world would not bring them any punishment. It was the desire of a king, Henry VIII that led to the English reformation! The feudal families and their manors had collected the best available women for the use of Lords of the manors. And they dictated the values. Fagin ran his school of pick-pocketing before the eyes of the authorities. Fagin might be a character; but the author of Oliver Twist got it from the society he was living in. Cervantes got Quixote from his society. Akbar the great could love and marry whoever he wanted to. Dushyantha could love Sakunthala to make her one among his co-queens, (we can't call them concubines because they belong to a king). In short the whole history is controlled by breaking values. Breaking of the values is nothing new to history. Vice today could become a virtue of tomorrow. And vice versa.

NKA: What difference do you find between e-publishing and orthodox publishing? Can the former be a proper alternative for the later? You ideas, please.
CPA: E-publishing, as I do it, has no difference from orthodox publishing. But the possibilities of the former are various and varied. There are sites that could be instantly uploaded. There are blogs and friendship sites, where you could publish yourself. E-publishing is very fast and up to date. You get the latest works of art and latest information on any branch of knowledge. You could even write a book on any topic in which you are a novice. This would gradually imperil the depth of the knowledge. But you can't escape the advantages it provides. Human venture is belittled, too. You have an outline of any knowledge in the net. Meditation and effort in gathering knowledge are ignored. The great many obituaries that appear on the death of a poet or scientist from writers who are not well-versed with the works of the deceased are a consequence. People are provided with only shallow information. I, for instance, am for orthodox publishing. It remains before your eyes and in your hearts. But it is very much limited to well-known writers and scholars. The blogs that appear today give us a new light on the parallel stream of literature; without blogs, we would have missed it. I have myself introduced a number of new writers. They are good ones. On very few occasions, the ezines are forced to publish some lower level works. But it happens in print media too. But e-publishing must be encouraged while we retain orthodox publishing. Orthodox publishing also depends highly on digital graphics and images, digital printing etc. Technology enhances and strengthens human endeavor.

NKA: What will you say about author-publisher relationship in India? What are the major problems, faced by the authors, poets, editors and scholars in getting their works published? Some publishers even demand money from the authors, what to say of royalty. The publishers do not promote new and emerging authors. What do you want say, Sir, about all this?
CPA: I don't like to comment on this. It is very deplorable. The publishers have their own coteries. They are given much coverage and exposure. Even in periodicals I write in, they like to print the books of those who mainly do not write in them. When I put a request, their question is: will it sell? You can sit well assured that the books that go unpublished, most of them, would sell more than the ones that were published. People's tastes and desires are artificially moulded. If the readers do not get the works of a writer, how will they know there are other writers? A terrible black out is going on. Writers are at the mercy of publishing capitalism. Of course, Mahasweta Devi and M. T. Vasudevan Nair would sell and get published. But lesser writers would be ignored; it is here that e-publishing has a place of importance.

NKA: Tell something about the contemporary literary scene in Kerala. Who are the other major literary figures writing both in Malayalam and English?
CPA: As far as I know, very few are there. K. Satchidanandan is there. T. P. Rajeevan is there, Anitha Thampi is there. Sangeetha is there. And a few others also write bilingually. I am one among them. I don't claim to be equal to them. I write, that is all. I say this not as mockery, I don't like to mock at any writer.
And contemporary literary scene in Kerala is very productive. There is a great output; I don't know how much the input was. I also don't believe that all books published by established publishing houses are that much worthy. But there are trends; there are trend setters, too. In Kerala every oven would cook any meal. They write one thing; I get a different meaning; text is not a concern of regard; reading is the concern. There are a few writers who insist upon texts. I don't want to name anyone.

NKA: What is the role of Kerala Language Institute in the promotion of literary activities in Kerala?
CPA: Language institute was and is promoting instructive and informational knowledge. In the beginning, it tried to promote a Malayalam glossary. Some words were accepted, some were unacceptable: for ordinary switch the Malayalam word given in glossary was: vidyuchhakti-gamana-agamana- niynthrana-yanthram( a machine controlling the coming and going of electricity). It was a farce of a language, a gimmick. But gradually the Institute has changed. From last year on, The International Bookfest Calicut is organized. It can encourage young scholars who can write books to publish their books. Authors like me were translating books without any training. Now the institute is imparting District wise training in translation. Not that all who attend would become good translators; but experiences are shared. And Dr. P.K.Pokker, the Director at present is a philosopher and scholar and a critic of repute. Under him, the institute is sure to make gains.

NKA: Your future writing plans?
CPA: I have a great many plans. I wish to write one or two novels. I have been on them for the last many years. I feel that most of what I have in mind does not open up in my writing. Still, I have been writing for the last fifty years. It was in 1959 that I translated ‘The Slave's Dream’ of Long Fellow. I also translated William Blake's ‘Night’; it is a poem that has influenced me greatly. I also translated Coleridge's ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. It was not a good translation. I did it when I was doing my undergraduate course in History. I have no publisher. My main sphere is poetry. Without poetry, I have no life, no love. Poetry and politics are my main preoccupations. I am in the left movement. I was a member in the national Preparatory committee that founded the Students Federation of India. I had contested an election in 1970 before I came into Govt service. I lost beautifully. Then like the Duke of Winsor I abdicated my political position. You know why the Duke of Winsor abdicated his throne. It is a pleasure to view things in the view point of the Duke. Unfortunately I lost my Empire and also the cause for which I abdicated. I don't harbor any sorrow on my decision. It was my personal decision.

Interview: Straight Talk With Onir, Director of My Brother Nikhil

Sakshi Juneja — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:59:48 EDT

Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to meet up with Onir, director of My Brother Nilkhil at a coffee shop in Versova. Onir, (who goes only by his first name), arrived a little late and wanted to wrap things up in fast. So without much ado, I went right ahead and asked the first question.

Please tell us something about your creative background?

I always wanted to make films, the only thing I can remember wanting to do is make films. When I joined college I took up literature parallel with film studies. Literature I think is very closely related to films and in India you don't start with film studies after school, you can only after graduation. And then I got my scholarship for Training in Film Making for which I went to Berlin.

And what brought you to Bollywood?

After I trained in Berlin I went back to Kolkata because that's where I did my university and initial training in film studies. I worked there for a while, made some documentary films and all. But anyway my aim was "fiction" and I realized the environment of Kolkata is not where I wanted to work because I was very young and wanted to be respected for what I do. And I found people very patronizing at that point there and it didn't suit me.

I came to Bombay as an editor actually…I started off as an editor. And it took me 10 years to make my first film. But for me it was very clear – I don't come from a film family, I don't come from a family where someone can say, here take 3 crores and make a film. I wanted to do it on my own, on my own terms and make the kind of films I wanted to make. Probably that's one of the reasons why it took that long because I was definite about the kind of films I wanted to make. And for me everything that I was doing while trying to make a film was a step towards that. I mean I produced music, directed music videos, made documentary films and then scripting; basically a whole lot of things.

And all this helped me to be able produce and direct my film within a controlled budget, since I had worked in every possible department.

For your first film, what made you pick a dicey subject like alternate sexuality and HIV?

Actually it became my first film by accident. The first script I wrote was also a dicey subject but it never got made. Hopefully it will someday. It was basically a story of a gigolo and nobody had the guts to finance such a project. And then I wrote my second script but nothing happened and then I wrote my third script. At that time I had just finished editing a documentary script on Dominic D'Souza who was the first known case of HIV in India. And that story kind of stayed with me…you know his photograph haunted me. And at one point I was getting frustrated because every story that I was writing found no one to finance it.

That's when I decided to do it myself. Sanjay Suri is a friend and has complete faith in me. I decided to go ahead with Dominic's story and make it into a docu-fiction and release it on TV. It sounded good and so I started writing. It was something I wrote in 10 days as it had left a lasting impact on me. It just came…just came like that.

And then we started meeting actors and everyone we approached said "yes" so we thought that instead of making it a TV film let's make a feature film.

Actually till I completed the film I never thought that this was a taboo. It was just that this story deeply moved me and the entire crew and cast were doing this for peanuts because they simply loved the story too. It was only after completing the film that I realized – Oh my God! In India, homosexuality is illegal what with Article 377 and there might be problems for release. So I was worried only when the censor time came, luckily that went through smoothly without any controversies.

It became my first film by accident, but all in all, the subjects I generally choose are slightly off the beaten track. Stories, which have already been told do not interest me; I need to tell stories wherein I too grow as a person and not just become a director, that's not my aim.

'Bas Ek Pal' (2006) didn't do well at the box office. According to the tabloids, it didn't appeal to either the critics or the masses. Where do you think the problem lay?

Two things. After My Brother Nikhil I got slotted. People expected My Brother Nikhil Part 2. For me it was however very clear that I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do something totally different which would help me grow as a director. In fact to me I have matured as a director only after Bas Ek Pal. In terms of reception it was a mix. Some critics really raved about the film whereas in print it didn't receive a favourable response.

The first reaction is obviously you get very defensive about everything that you do. But later on I sat down and analysed the film all over again and realized that there were certain things that went against it. The distribution for instance: In Mumbai only 14 prints were released and only two night shows were available in the suburban side. Another thing I believe I messed up with was the execution of the film's climax scene.

Otherwise I think it's a complex, very mature film, which to me was the exciting bit. Unfortunately the current trend involves audience watching comedies and idiotic comedies. And it's very worrying when rubbish films like Welcome, Partner become box-office success. Personally I have nothing against comedies but these are bad films, period. And good, deserving films like Johnny Gaddar and Manorama Six Feet Under are complete washouts.

Sometime in 2006 you were thinking of making an adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' starring Hrithik Roshan. Is this project going to see the light of day?

Again, today no one wants to do a dark film. I am talking around, speaking to artists and film banners but everyone is looking for profit. For example Omkara was critically applauded but financially, it didn't do well. Therefore actors are skeptical about taking up such offers. Actors, producers, basically everybody.

You also acted in Schau mir in die Augen, Kleiner (2007) aka Here's looking at You, Boy - The Coming out of Queer Cinema (International: English title). This is a documentary on the history of gay and lesbian film. How was it like acting in an international setting?

No I did not acted in the film. It was a documentary film which featured 14 directors from across the world on the subject of homosexuality. And I was selected as one of the directors and it was featured during the Berlin Film Festival. A fantastic experience overall.

What do you think about the censor board's stand in today's Bollywood?

Honestly speaking I have been very lucky. Like with My Brother Nikhil I thought there will be plenty of issues but it was cleared without any cuts.

But then it was backed by Yash Raj Films.

No. The censor dealing was done before Yash Raj's takeover of the film for distribution. My team consisted of all first timers, including myself. I was literally shaking once the film was given for censorship approval. When I met them they said that we will give the film a 'U' certificate provided you give a statement at the beginning that it's a fictitious film, which I was ready to comply with. And for me this was a huge thing, I mean we live in a country, which is still very outdated in terms of its views on sexuality, especially alternate sexuality.

Do you think there is a lack of good scripts in Bollywood? If so, why?

Yes it's true. Because apart from actors we don't want to pay anyone else. Actors believe they are the film themselves and therefore charge enormous amounts. Then there is no budget left for anything else. Also our copyright laws are weak that it's an easy job to keep making remakes. Plus financiers prefer to stick with the 'tried-and-tested' formulae and our audience goes ahead and approves such re-creations. And at the end of the day everything boils down to the audience.

Which actor/actress you would like to work with in the near future?

Actually I never had this fascination or inclination towards working with any special set of actors. For me the script comes first and whoever suits it best and is within the budget is offered the role. So no wish list for me as of now.

Any recent movie you wish you were part of?

Johnny Gaddar. I thought it was a brilliant film. Sad it didn't do well. Then there was Manorama Six Feet Under and I also liked Chuk De minus the beginning and the end.

Define 'crossover cinema'?

Frankly I really don't know; I mean crossing over to what? Films from India which are screened overseas are mostly big budget films. It has nothing to do with quality but everything to do with who's backing the project (film).

People perceive that films like Page 3 and My Brother Nikhil are crossover films but unfortunately they don't even get released overseas. Especially the US and UK market, the thing is NRI audiences are worse than the audience back home because they are so nostalgic about India that they prefer to watch its glossy image. And therefore you have big banners making films especially to please them by inserting glamorised costumes and bhangra songs.

Where do you see India cinema going over the next decade, given that in recent times we have seen a shift in the kind of movies being made and scripts being written, as well as the willingness of mainstream actors to try different genres other than commercial flicks?

I don't know really. We keep talking about how big is Bollywood but frankly we are living in a make believe world. For example, if you look at the earnings of a biggest grosser of the past couple of years and compare it to a Korean film, which would be looked at as world cinema, ours would be barely 13% of that.

Our films are not world cinema. When we talk about overseas we simply mean NRI audiences. Our films have still not matured with respect to world cinema. The day we are able to get the local audience in cities like New York, London, Sydney maybe then we would qualify as global filmmakers. But then our population is so huge and spread out that we really don't care much about the world market.

Hopefully 10 years from now we will have audiences which are open to all kinds of cinema.

What is your take on depiction of homosexuality in today's Hindi films?

It sickens me honestly. I find it silly mostly the way it is depicted. I find it stupid how actors are insecure; if it's not making fun they wouldn't want to do the character. They are insecure about how they will be perceived but that's really stupid because enacting a homosexual character doesn't make one a homosexual. Even our double standards are put on display. Today one animal rights group will ask for help and the whole Jing-bang will be there to lend a helping hand but when you talk about human rights, basic human rights let alone homosexuality, no one will give you the time of the day.

Similarly our whole society including the film industry is so homophobic. So they'd rather make fun of it. And what is even more depressing is that some of them are closet homosexuals themselves. I mean they don't have to talk about their sexuality but the least they could do is not make a mockery of others and their sexual preference.

I feel it should be dealt with with a certain responsibility; after all you are talking about someone else's life. But I suppose Bollywood specializes in making mockery of those who are 'different'.

Can you tell us something on your new and forthcoming films?

Well I am working on a film called Sorry Bhai. A romantic film with an interesting star cast. I have Shabana Azmi, Boman Irani, Sharman Joshi, Sanjay Suri and Chitrangada Singh is making a comeback with this film. I am looking forward to it because it's a different genre for me, it's a happy film but it also deals with complexities of adult relationships.

Your involvement with HIV/Aids awareness campaign.

After My Brother Nikhil I have been involved in all kinds of campaigns, seminars, conferences dealing with Human Rights. I am also trying to remove time for conducting workshops for Aids infected youth in Shillong, hopefully every year. See the thing is movies and all will keep happening but life also involves personal growth and being part of such activities helps me achieve that.

Straight speak and blunt – Onir was a refreshing change from the run of the mill Bollywood interviewees. Here's looking at you Onir and wish you all the best for your future projects!

Narayana Murthy on Entrepreneurship

Intrepid — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:43:06 EDT

I was privileged to attend an interview of N R Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of Infosys Technologies. The interview session was part of a "Leaders and Learners" session organized by TIE at Welingkar's Institute in Mumbai. Murthy was interviewed by Anuradha Sengupta of CNBC TV18, and a select panel of entrepreneurs. Then the forum was thrown open to questions asked by the audience. Here were some of the key takeaways from this brilliant and humor-filled session:

Q. What does it take to start your own venture?
NM: You need 4 things before you can think of starting your own venture:
1. Idea. The key idea or concept of the service or product you want to sell in the market
2. Market value of the idea. You must have a basic level of confidence in the fact that the market values your product and is willing to pay for it.
3. Team. You must have a team of complementary skillsets - so identify your own strengths, and find people who have different, but complementary strengths.
4. High aspirations. You must be someone who sets his/her sights high, and is willing to work very hard to achieve those aspirations.

Q. What must a startup do for branding?
NM: Do unusual things. Infosys has always attracted the press and positive publicity by doing unusual things, which interest people.

Q. Who were your idols or people you looked up to?
NM: When we started our business, there were already well-established business leaders who had founded and expanded their companies while sticking to sound ethical principles - JRD Tata, even Mr. Birla, TVS, Mr. Kirloskar. Of course, by that time Bill Gates had also become well-known. Intel was one of the foremost examples of success for most security companies to follow.

Q. What is a non-negotiable component when starting your own business?
NM: A sound value system. You have to lead by example, you must walk the talk, eat your own dogfood. Only when will your team trust you implicitly, and only then will they deliver and help achieve the common goals.

Q. What are the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur?
1. Ability to work with other people and work in a team
2. Passion and will to persevere
3. High degree of optimism
4. High aspirations for oneself and for the company
5. Ability to put long-term interest ahead of short-term benefit

Q. How do you judge the value of your idea?
NM: You should be able to express your idea and its value to the market in a simple sentence. Not a compound sentence, nor a complex sentence.

Q. How do you attract and retain talent?
The leadership must articulate a grand vision - an exciting future. This will create a challenging work culture and attract future leaders to the company. The vision must be a story that is compelling, believable, and intrigues and excites the minds of the team members.

Q. What do you think about work-life balance?
I remember K V Kamath's answer to this question: first let's make a life, then think about work-life balance. I don't understand the concept of a work-life balance.

Q. How do you define success, and at what stage did you consider yourself successful, and why?
NM: I have thought a lot on this subject, and my definition of a successful person is one who when he/she walks into a room, people's eyes light up. If he/she brings a smile to people's faces, then irrespective of whether that person is educated, not educated, self-employed, employed, I would still consider that person to be successful. And going by that definition, I am still not sure whether I would consider myself as being successful.

Interestingly, Murthy's favorite books are Richard Feynmann's Lectures on Physics, and History of Mathematics vols 1,2,3.

Interview: Bindumadhav Khire, Gay Activist and Marathi Writer

Nitin Karani — Tue, 6 May 2008 00:38:35 EDT

Bindumadhav Khire is a techie who gave up his career in the US to return to India and get involved with issues close to his heart. Based in his native Pune ever since his return, Bindu is a gay rights and AIDS activist.

He has been speaking about queer issues at various forums in India, particularly in his city. In 2005, Bindu donned the hat of a Marathi writer with his novel, Partner. NGOs working in the field of sexuality have been using Partner for sensitisation. Bindu’s latest book, Indradhanu: Samalaingikateche Vividh Ranga ("Rainbow: The Various Hues of Homosexuality"), discusses different aspects of homosexuality from an Indian perspective. "Indradhanu" promises to be of value to people from various backgrounds, especially gay and bisexual youth struggling with their sexual orientation, and their parents and friends; people from the medical fraternity; NGOs working in related fields; policy makers; corporates; and the media. Bindu is currently working on another Marathi book, A, B, C of Sexuality.

Below, excerpts from my e-mail interview with Bindumadhav Khire:

Being gay should be a non-issue in an ideal world. What were the milestones, and highs and lows until you reached a point of self-acceptance, when you could acknowledge your "gayness" to all without it becoming a confessional?

KHIRE: I went through denial (when I hoped I would change), depression (I thought of committing suicide) and hate (towards God for making me gay). I was shy, very poor in communication, had zero self-esteem. I was married and got divorced a year later. When I was in the US, I got in touch with San Francisco-based Trikone (an LGBT organisation) and that’s how I started becoming comfortable with my sexuality. I volunteered with them and became part of the "Trikone family". I became the assistant publisher and then publisher of "Trikone", their quarterly magazine.

As I became more comfortable with my sexuality, I started feeling suffocated and felt that I had to come out. I first came out to a friend at the workplace. Every coming out then was an adventure. I participated in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, the San Jose Gay Pride Parade. … When I came back to India, I came out to my parents. This was the most difficult part. They were shocked. It's taken them time to cope with my being gay. My mother's been just great. My experiences in the US and achieving financially stability went a long way in helping me so that now I don’t give a damn what neighbours, friends and strangers feel about me.

What made you give up a lucrative career as a software engineer in the US to return to Pune much before NRI homecomings became a trend? You could have stayed there and been involved with causes close to your heart in the local community?

Once I was comfortable with my sexuality, I saw no reason to file for a Green Card and stay in the US. I also felt guilty about having got married. I wanted to come out and expiate that guilt. Also, despite having stayed in the US for four years and loving every moment of it, I did feel a bit like a fish out of water. I am more comfortable here (in Pune).

How much did you have to educate yourself so to speak about the work you are doing now, and how did you do it?

A lot. A lot of reading and learning had to be done. Luckily, I received much help from some outstanding people like Dr. Raman Gangakhedkar (He taught me pre- and post-test counselling and related ethical issues)., Dr. Vijay Thakur (He taught me the principles of befriending and the basics of running a helpline.), Dr. Bhooshan Shukla (He gave me info on sexuality.), Sunita Wahi gave me a lot of books to read. ... I could go on and on. Also, I had to do a lot of soul-searching on each of these issues … especially the ethical part.

What's the gay scene like in Pune, which is considered quite conservative? How visible is the community? Despite its young student and BPO-KPO communities, is Pune still like Mumbai of the late 1980s when the only community activity in the city was one gay disco a week and one evening of cruising in a park?

The community is not visible at all. The important difference from Mumbai of the 1980s is the advent of the Internet. The number of cruising sites has increased as has blackmail and harassment. In the medical field, not much change though – most psychiatrists are either homophobic or hypocritical. They are our biggest enemies.

You recently said that for every one gay person in Pune who has helped you, there have been 10 heterosexuals who gave you their support. Why do you feel our community itself is ignoring you? What is the rationale for their apathy?

This apathy did come as a surprise. I think most closeted gay people hate anyone who has fought and found his freedom; they are jealous of anyone who escapes from hypocrisy. But I don’t blame them. At one time I used to hate Ashok Row Kavi for the same reason.

What are the top three issues you think are hurting gay people in India and what's your practical prescription for these?

The biggest problem is either ignorance or apathy in the community about the issue of Section 377 (of the Indian Penal Code). I have come across many gay men who don’t even know it's illegal for them to have sex.

Here, of course, we activists are to be blamed. We have done a shoddy job of highlighting the 377 issue. It's shameful, the kind of third-rate people who call themselves gay activists these days. Sometimes I think the gay movement will go down the drain the way women's lib in India has failed miserably. The other serious problem is that for many who know about 377 don’t care whether it stays or goes. I can't figure that one out. How could anyone not care whether that ugly piece of law is erased or not, I don’t know. Is it because many of us have decided to live a double life anyway?

Number two: how many of us have taken the time to seriously become comfortable with our sexuality and gain basic knowledge on alternate sexuality? So many of us spend the whole night finding new partners on the net or at (cruising) sites, and spend the next day hating ourselves for it. We don’t really give a damn about our mental health. That’s sad because instead of accepting our sexuality as beautiful and our love as pure, we spend our entire life burning in self-hate.

Lastly, despite knowing the high incidence of HIV in the gay community, many of us still continue to have sex without condoms. We refuse to become mature and take control of our lives. I can provide you information and condoms but I can't control HIV infection unless YOU care about yourself.

Activism and writing have always had a special bond. Did the need to write arise from there for you?

I think so. I used to feel ashamed to tell gays and 'straights' that "no, sorry but there is no book out there in Marathi that discusses gay issues". There was also another reason. In the US I had many gay friends to talk to. In Pune, I felt very suffocated as there were few people I could talk to about my issues and feelings. I think Partner was the outcome of these two reasons.

The HIV/AIDS helpline manual came from the experience of running my own helpline and helping set-up and supervise another HIV/AIDS helpline in Pune. Again, there was nothing in Marathi on the hows of setting up such a helpline. Writing has become a need for me. … Also, instead of repeating the same things over and over, it's better to put these down so that people can have access to answers long after I have (mentally) burnt out.

As an activist and former techie, do you feel an acute lack of online gay-themed literature in Marathi and other Indian languages?

Yes, definitely. The Indian gay movement's biggest failure is not being able to present its views to the common man in a language he understands. All we have is people who write in English, which is read by a negligible percentage of the population. Very few Indians are comfortable with English. It is also a relatively ‘safe’ language; there is a lesser chance of an aggressive reaction from people if the medium is English. It's not that English should not be used to voice our issues but by using only this language we ensure that gay issues remain Western or elitist subjects and indirectly help in propagating the stereotype that ‘gayness’ is a Western import.

How do Marathi press, cinema and theatre portray gay issues? Do they mainly demonise us or 'invisibilise' us?

Newspapers ignore these issues. But the gay Marathi-speaking community is to be blamed, too. How many of them write on gay issues? Is it not our duty to utilise the free press that we have, to talk about our issues? As far as cinema is concerned, except for Amol Palekar's 'Thang' (Quest) there is no Marathi feature film that has dealt with gay issues. Again, the gay community needs to make gay films. I hate this stand of waiting for someone else to come and fight our battles – is it a cultural thing with us Indians?

Do plays, books like yours and movies like 'Thang' generate either heat and dust or any debate in the Maharashtrian community?

Very few people want to see facets of life that make them uncomfortable. So they either choose to ignore (partly because they are in denial) or they get all worked up about it and froth at the mouth. There is no sincere attempt to understand issues related to homosexuality – because most people don’t want to. Still, it is important we keep on voicing our issues through various media. For those few who want to become more human, these resources should be available in Indian languages.

Disclosure: This writer is associated with Bindumadhav Khire's NGO for gays and men-who-have-sex-with men, ‘Samapathik Trust’, Pune (E-mail: samapathik@hotmail.com. Helpline: (0) 9890744677 (7 pm to 8 pm – Mondays only)

Extracts from the full interview were published in the The New Indian Express on Saturday, 3 May 2008.

Interview: Michael Levin - The Next Great Clash

Desh — Mon, 5 May 2008 09:38:50 EDT

I very rarely find a book that I cannot keep down, specially when it comes to politics. The Next Great Clash: China and Russia vs. The United States by Michael Levin is a revelation. Not many analysts really do serious research before writing. Levin is different. He is a serious analyst who has had long stints in Soviet Union/Russia and China and he is currently Executive-in-Residence at the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

The introduction to the book starts in the most thoughtful manner. It is so gripping that you start believing in the power of book introductions once again - an art that had long vanished! He discusses his tough childhood and fight with disease as well as his struggle to learn about Russia and his success after some aimless times.

I love Levin's expression as it is profound, although it talks of some mundane things like global politics. Like he says:

"Reading is the collecting of intellectual income, writing is the spreading of it."

He uses a lot of research and the models of other researchers to test his conclusions that are based on his experience and knowledge.

Overall, a great book to read! Here is my interview with Michael Levin, the author.

1. You have talked of "One Radical Imbalance (American Debt) sustains another (Asian Surplus)". Just as the "rich" in the US are betting, foolishly, on a never ending stream of debt; aren't the Chinese, again foolishly, betting on unending stream of export wealth? And while talking of the aging US (and Western) population, we forget the same trend for China as well. So two questions:

(a) Is this a game of "who blinks first?" between the US and China and - in that sense - a repeat of the Star Wars tactic to destroy Soviet Union under its own weight?
(b) Is the Chinese "surplus" a notional surplus since it's invested in an instrument that it can best see ride down as the clash with the US increases?

LEVIN: Two things to keep in mind: if there is an economic break between the US and China, China has an ace in the hole: it can divert its attention to satisfying the demand of its domestic consumers as a replacement for export-led growth. The US seems to be at a disadvantage - it does not have an ace in the hole.

Second: You are right - both countries face demographic imbalances that will pose challenges in the future. It seems that America's advantage is its ability to absorb immigrants - recent protectionist sentiments aside. China also has some advantages: its social structure dictates that children take care of parents; it is a private, family matter - so the state is not, thus far, burdened with pension plans.

Imagine the additional wealth that China will have at its disposal as it implements pension schemes.

2. For the clash to tangibly occur as a military confrontation, a complete decoupling between China and US economies needs to occur. What will be that mechanism? Is it possible for either to voluntarily decouple from each other?

If there is outright war, the decoupling will be a byproduct. The whole global economy will go haywire.

But China is developing asymmetric capabilities that exploit US weaknesses. If China is able to prevent the US from protecting Taiwan during a military confrontation - it has won.

By the way - I would like to emphasize: I hope I am all wrong about the next great clash. As you see though, the evidence is quite compelling.

3. Like you said very well, Europe learnt to use the "Human Rights Imperialism" with telling effect. It is very true that all the major powers use a Utopian ideal to create surrogates and followers. Again, as you have very rightly said - the US has considerably weakened two major alliances (UN and NATO) in recent years (probably the worst foreign affairs folly of the last 8 years despite Iraq). So, the US has lost that romantic "Moral Imperialistic Ideal" that inspired other people in its "mission". China, on the other hand, has embraced capitalism and has also weakened its position in its strongest "base" - the Communists and Marxists! Predictably, China has also lost its "Moral Imperialistic Ideal". How will these two powers gather vassals and followers?

Not really. The Chinese have demonstrated that they are successful communists - unlike their Soviet brethren. The Beijing consensus of economic development seems to have more adherents than the current Washington consensus. And the Chinese have very skillfully honed their image (although the recent disturbances in Tibet have upset China's "charm offensive") in the Muslim world, in Africa, and in Latin America.

4. India's "fascination" for the USSR and Russia is mainly because of a consistent and uninterrupted arms flow as opposed to wavering US positions. In the last one and a half decades, India has sent more professional immigrants to the US than all the other countries put together (every year, Indians get 40-50% of all H1B visas). That creates an intellectual ripple effect over two generations that moves out to influence minds as opposed to lobbyists. At the same time, with the highest percentage of younger population in the major economies, English education, and an education system that is privately owned so it can adjust to the demand rapidly, India is positioned to become the provider of world's management and executive talent over the next few years. How does that change the dynamics of the world's economies in the coming centuries? (PS: Rajat Gupta, the CEO of McKinsey, for example was instrumental in opening a world class business school in India - ISB - and also has expanded McKinsey's presence in India. Same goes for the PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi).

You know way more about India than I ever will.

5. Does India's business elite have a great deal of influence within the corridors of political power, or are they simply one more lobby to contend with? It seems that India's leaders rise through political parties/families - they do not come from business circles. Also, the Indian business community in Russia is highly organized and very wealthy. I would imagine that they are very involved with the Congress party, whereas Indian business elites in the U.S. might identify more with the BJP. What do you think?

Undoubtedly India has a great competitive advantage in its English-language capability - but the Chinese are very determined and hard-working. And they seem to be much better organized politically and so could easily launch a national English-language campaign (Incidentally, there is a fascinating article about this in the most recent New Yorker).

6. Despite its earlier start and higher percentage rise in GDP over last 3 decades, China has less than half the number of billionaires (official wealth counted) than India. Does that tell a tale? Is China's economy a government-sponsored musical chairs of using money where it sees the best returns and forcing its decisions into enterprise-led initiatives? With rising paper surpluses and a challenge from the US and a private-government combine of Indian economy* apart from a slowly awaking Japanese military power, does the Chinese economy appear to you as a "House of Cards"?

(PS: the Kazakhastan deal for oil was greatly influenced by the Lakshmi Mittal - who owns large steel plants in that country and has a JV with ONGC - in India's favor against the Chinese bids.)

China's economy does have many weak points - chief amongst them, its high percentage of non-performing bank loans (which you point out elsewhere). But China also has many strengths that are not captured by statistics and economic data - such as its ability to mobilize the population and a fervent belief that their time has come. The Chinese are also used to deprivation and sacrifice - something that most westerners are not familiar with.

Regarding the number of billionaires - some thoughts: Do these statistics take into account the number of overseas Chinese who are billionaires?

Also, in China, political connections are more important than wealth (although that may start to change). It would seem that the massive levels of corruption also distort the wealth statistics.

In a sense, all of the members of the central committee (approximately 300) are billionaires of power. And they are not wanting for material comforts.

7. In World War II, the US was an Aaly of Western Europe for the most part. It did not START any war until the end, which many believe it ended in an immoral way. Since then, there have been very few, if any, wars which the US has started and won. Does the US have the ability to attract allies that can forge its position? China has created its vassal states like Pakistan and North Korea to fight its wars that it does not want to fight itself. It has chosen to use the poverty of these vassal states while arming them and providing them with a sense of self-esteem in the absence of actual wealth (a policy very fruitfully used by the British with Indian kings during colonial rule) to create a vast strong set of "allies". How do these two strategies (or otherwise) of the US and China in the recent decades affect the future dynamics?

No one likes a bully - all the kids gang up on the bully as soon as he is down. George Bush/the US is perceived as the bully, and China is skillfully exploiting this, but recent events in Tibet are a great threat to China's strategy of seeking a more "multipolar" world.

8. Finally, a rather small detail: You said that you would sell expensive editions of the Koran in Russia - where your contacts were "refuseniks" (Jews refused immigration to Israel) to earn money. Why were these Jews buying the Koran, and not the Torah?

Please note: i did not sell the Korans - i gave them to the refuseniks, who in turn sold them on the black market to muslims. Access to the Torah was not a problem.

An Evening At A Brothel

Naveen Kumar — Fri, 2 May 2008 10:33:41 EDT

Varun, a 20 year Delhi University student talks to Naveen Kumar about his college life and his experience at a brothel. The interview is original and non fictional.

You are a Delhi University student, so how is college life?

The college life is rocking. The first thing you do in a college is make a group with whom you can hang out and enjoy.

So, what are your hang out destinations?

Well, there are many places like G.K., Janpath, Vasant Vihar, Saket and many more to do some crazy stuff. You know every place rocks with friends.

What crazy stuff have you done? Any good or bad experience you would like share?

I’ve been drinking and creating nuisance many times but my most shocking experience was at a brothel.

Oh really? You’ve been to a brothel! What was so shocking about the experience?

One day, about two months back, I and my three friends had got high after having a few cans of beer. We all had an unstoppable urge of having sex. So we all decided to go to G.B. Road, we had heard about getting cheap prostitutes there.

This is interesting. So what happened then?

Walking on the road we could see the prostitutes calling us from the balconies and windows. Pimps were busy telling us the rates. So, at last we agreed on a deal of Rs 240 per person for a 24 year old girl.

Then we all entered a narrow stairway and walked upstairs. The pimp told us that the girl was waiting upstairs. We all were very excited. Then the girl came, and to our shock she was not a 24 year old chic but approximately above 35 year old aunty. She was dark and ugly.

She asked us to have sex with her. We all were horrified. We turned to the pimp and asked, “Ye kya hai?” We were trapped from both sides as in front of us was the woman and behind us was the fat pimp. Then the woman took out a big blade from under a small bench lying there and said, “I’ll chop off your penis, just zip your mouth and take out all the money you have.”

We were so scared to death, that we gave all the money we had, but kept some to reach back home. Man! That was hell of an experience.

That was indeed horrifying; do you think D.U. male students usually visit these places?

I don’t think so, but I would like to suggest that if one really wants to go, than he must have some kind of an acquaintance there. It would be safer.

Thanks a lot Varun, for sharing your experience and being undiplomatic.