Category Archives: Books

A single, stray act of violence

While there have been hundreds of inter-religious riots in the history of independent India, there have been only two pogroms: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and that directed at the Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002. There are some striking similarities between the two. Both began as a response to a single, stray act of violence committed by members of the minority community. Both proceeded to take a generalized revenge on the minorities as a whole. The Sikhs who were butchered wered in no way connected to the Sikhs who killed Mrs Gandhi. The Muslims who were killed by Hindu mobs were completely innocent of the Godhra crime (which may anyway have been an accident).

In both cases the pogroms were made possible by the willed breakdown of the rule of law. The prime minister in Delhi in 1984, and the chief minister in Gujarat in 2002, issued graceless statements that in effect justified the killings. And serving ministers in their government went as far as to aid and direct the rioters.

The final similarity is the most telling, as well as perhaps the most depressing. Both parties, and leaders, reaped electoral rewards from the violence they had legitimized and overseen. Rajiv Gandhi’s party won the 1984 general election by a very large margin, and in December 2002 Narendra Modi was re-elected as chief minister of Gujarat after his party won a two-thirds majority in the assembly polls.

- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi

All culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone

In [D. R. Goyal’s] rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows:

“Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.”

- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi

Too embarassed to talk about it

It is difficult precisely to date Sanjay Gandhi’s own interest in family planning. His Surge interview in August 1975 does not mention the subject at all. Yet a year later, the Illustrated Weekly of India was speaking of how ‘Sanjay has given a big impetus to the Family Planning Programme throughout the country’. [..] He epxressed himself in favor of compulsory sterilization, for which facilities should be provided ‘right down to the village level’.

[..]

In his tours around India, Sanjay Gandhi catalysed a competitive process between the states of the Union. Sanjay would tell one chief minister of what another had claimed to have done – ’60 000 operations in two weeks’ – and encouraged him to exceed it. These targets were passed down to district officials, who were rewarded if they met or exceeded them and transferred otherwise. The process led to widespread coercion. Lower government officials had to submit to the surgeon’s knife before arrears of pay were cleared. Truck drivers would not have their licences renewed if they could not produce a sterilization certificate. Slum dwellers would not be allotted a plot for resettlement unless they did likewise.

[..]

Local officials prepared lists of ‘eligible men’, that is, of those who already had three or more children. Police vans would come and take them off to the nearest health centre. Some men fled into the hills to escape the marauders. Those who had undergone a vasectomy were too embarassed to talk about it.

- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi

The safest people in India

To make the protection of British lives the top priority was pretty much state policy. In February 1947 the governor of Bengal said that his ‘first action in the event of an announcement of a date for withdrawal of British power … would be to have the troops “standing to” and prepare for a concentration of outlying Europeans at very short notice as soon as hostile reactions began to show themselves’. In fact, in the summer of 1947 white men and women were the safest people in India. No one was interested in killing them. But their insecurities meant that many army units were placed near European settlements instead of being freed for riot control elsewhere.

[..]

The decision of the CPM to join the government was preceded by a bitter debate, with Jyoti Basu speaking in favour and Promode Dasgupta against. Ultimately the party joined, only to create a great sense of expectation among the cadres. An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

- Ramachandran Guha, India After Gandhi

Possibilities for being entertained

About nine years ago I played in a Team Fortress Classic team. TFC was a PC game with a large community of competitive leagues. Our team would meet online to practice and plan tactics, and then compete with other teams in our league. The only difference from a sport was that we weren’t getting any excersise out of it. But it was hard, fun, and social.

While I was playing TFC, Jim Rossignol was coaching players in Quake 3, another first-person shooter. He did it so obsessively that it cost him his job, which got him started on a career in gaming journalism. Today he’s an editor of the excellent PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and has written a smart book about online gaming culture.

This Gaming Life is about the social aspect of computer games. Rossignol believes that games are a waste of time, and that’s a good thing. They prevent boredom, one of the major challenges of a leisure-based culture, and they give rise to interesting new forms of social interaction.

Rossignol writes about nationally televised Starcraft championships in South Korea, where gaming is part of the mainstream youth culture. We hear about corporate backstabbing in EVE Online, a space adventure MMORPG with its own functional economy, and about the mod community, where fans create their own variations of commercial games.

Unusually for a non-fiction book about a hypable cultural trend, Rossignol’s tone is that of a calm and reasoned essay, providing genuine insights into gaming culture. More of that!

The eye sprang out of his face like a yolk from a broken egg

It’s easy to see why Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird made him unpopular in Eastern Europe. A kid wanders through Poland during World War 2, and, suspected of being a gypsy, is abused by superstitious peasants. Every page hammers down the message of how stupid and brutal Eastern European peasants are. Who wouldn’t be offended?

It’s harder to understand why many reviewers thought the novel was semi-autobiographical. At one point the kid pushes a man who is trying to kill him down into an abandoned bunker, where he is eaten by rats. The rats swarm over the man, tearing his flesh apart, consuming him, until all that is left is a lone hand sticking up from the sea of rats.

That’s not a traumatic war memory. That’s a visual punchline in a self-mocking horror movie. There are many episodes like this, and I wonder if some of the novel’s reputation came from 1965 readers being more easily shocked, and mistaking their reactions for the discomfort one can get from a truly great novel. Me, I think of Evil Dead. I almost stopped reading, not because it’s too disgusting, but because I think Kosinski is trying to be serious here.

The second half is better. Kosinski ends the gore-fest, and gets to the point, which is to make the kid a sociopath who muses over why some people are strong, and others weak. Who is the more useful ally: God, Satan, Hitler or Stalin? The answer, he concludes, is no-one. Everyone stands alone, separated as by mountains.

A very innocent time

I wonder what impression a viewing marathon of 1946 films would leave on the mind of someone who never knew that year. How true a picture would it give of the time? When I look back, as I frequently do, at movies of the thirties and forties, and compare them with the reality I knew then, as schoolboy, soldier and young newspaperman, I can say that they reflect very fairly our backgrounds, our values and some of our ideals.

I insert the word “some” as one who has never been politically committed, except for brief periods after every political meeting I ever reported: if it was a Labour meeting I came out somewhere to the right of P.C. Wren; if Conservative, my feelings would have made Lenin look like a hesitant moderate. But I concede that those with strong political views might not think that old movies gave a true picture, inasmuch as they had no time for extremism, either way.

What does come off them, very strongly, is a remarkable innocence. No doubt the Hays Office and the British Board of Film Censors had something to do with it, but not all that much. It was, as I look back and remember, a very innocent time – even with the Depression and Hitler and the atom bomb, it was still innocent. Perhaps that was why they happened.

- George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World

The audience will laugh them off the screen

At first glance, Hollywood and pirates would seem to be made for each other, but in fact they are not. Apart from the technical difficulty that sailing ships are nightmare machines which refuse to stay still, and even large models have their problems, there is the plain fact that pirates – the real pirates of history – the Blackbeards and Morgans and Kidds and Calico Jacks – are too bizarre, too larger-than-life, too unreal even for the cinema. That they were real is irrelevant; their truth is too strange for fiction, and pantomime and Peter Pan have turned the grim reality into a comic figure which usually defies attempts to fashion it for conventional drama, or even melodrama.

Madmen who run about with blazing fireworks in their whiskers, eccentrics who hold religious services and prohibit swearing on their unholy cruises, red-headed hussies who put to sea disguised as men and fight duels to the death – they may do for send-up, but try to present them as they truly were, and the audience will laugh them off the screen.

- George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World

Not a very comfortable seat

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Okay then. George R. R. Martin. A Game of Thrones.

Perfect. Brilliant.

The fans who are pestering Martin about when he’ll finish the series are assholes. Of course it takes time to write this good. I wouldn’t even mind if there was only this one book. It’s that good.

And yes, this is the perfect material for an HBO series.

No more to say. I’ll try to do better with the next one.

Do you take off your wooden leg before you make love to your wife?

I like the part of the counterculture that was offensive, funny and nutty. People like George Carlin, Robert Crumb – and Paul Krassner.

Krassner was editor of The Realist, a satirical underground magazine best known for the 1967 hoax The Parts That Were Left Out of The Kennedy Book, a supposedly censored excerpt from a Kennedy biography where Lyndon Johnson is caught fucking the bullet-hole in the neck of Kennedy’s corpse. I think that’s pretty funny. I think the aftermath is funnier: Some people, including Daniel Ellsberg, seriously considered that the story might be true. (The same issue contained the equally famous Disneyland Memorial Orgy cartoon.)

Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut collects these and other stories from Krassner’s life: about his friendship with Lenny Bruce, how he introduced Groucho Marx to LSD, his bizarre time as editor of Hustler, and his career with the Yippies.

Once, as an experiment, he decided to stop laughing, which triggered an onset of P. K. Dickian paranoia, and he spent a year in a world of cosmic conspiracies.

Well, maybe the drugs played a role too. Anyway, he got over it, (the paranoia and the not laughing, that is) – and he still performs stand-up comedy.

The book also contains my all-time favourite opening line of an autobiography: “I first woke up at the age of six.” When did you wake up?