I’m wondering about programmes like “The weakest link” or these talkshows where people talk in a loose manner and the host is paid to throw in nasty putdowns. Some people defend these shows, by saying something like: “They’re showing something which is also true about human nature”. So, these shows would work like astringents. Those who enjoy them, are suffering from sacharrine overdose, from watching neat Hollywood movies and detective television series. Mainstream Hollywood only deals with mainstream reality. It leaves great wildernesses unexplored – pure greed and nastiness ( “The Weakest Link”), the joy of seeing a starlet being put down in a talk show are just some nearer approaches of these vast prairies.

The mainstream audience is aware something is missing from the stuff it is rationed, which is supposed to represent its tastes. Chips and hamburgers are nice, but it also wants pickles, thousand year eggs, Sichuan pepper. I used to think, with dread, that after decades of being fed the standard stuff, the audience would have been conditioned to like only that ( we are talking about the mainstream audience, the neat big block of the population). Mass production culture was to engender Mass production man. What went wrong with the corporate politburo’s indoctrination programme?

Maybe the fault lies with television itself. It is like a salesman endlessly, 24 hour, 7 day a week wedging its foot in your door. Its grab for people’s attention, which started 60 years ago , has become more and more desperate, with standards reaching new abysses every year. While sinking in the mud, the beast has thrown up to the surface some things which the audience should not have gained access to – odd sensations.

It could also have to do with internet. Through email many people have actually started enjoying expressing themselves in a written form. I remember when I was small, if someone would go to live abroad, his friends would tell him “Well , take care. You know I’m not very good at writing…”. Writing letters was considered bothersome. After two or three awkward attempts, people would fall on to the yearly christmas card. But with email, people do write, and many even enjoy it. Of course, they send each other endless jokes and photos but still, a lot of writing does go on. And that opens new rooms in the brain, it starts enjoying odd turns of the phrase, puns, allusions, bold assertions, what if’s.

Another extraordinary phenomenon: blogs. Who would have thought people , yes, standard issue people, , would regularly put their ruminations and doggerel on the web for the whole world to see ? Instead of just watching Dallas, they would write what they thought of the last episode, and disagree with someone else about it, and discuss the thing over ?

Maybe programmes like Skipe are not so good in this respect. Email is getting out of fashion, blogs could also be in danger. You can just talk yourself silly now. You can even have these making- up conversations with your lover where at first everything one says is followed by a long silences to think and digest and prepare a reply, and after three hours, when everything’s repaired, both are mumbling fervent promises and kissing the phone receiver– and one is in Cleveland and the other in Nauru. It is great for lovers, but it does cut in the woods of written language. SMS also doesn’t work good in this respect because it represents a sort of fast food version of written language, very compact and emphasizing short punchy lines over deeper expressions.

Unless an equilibrium is reached, just like the normal mail has survived the arrival of internet. Except that the mail has become a strictly utilitarian medium, there are not so many love letters anymore. Maybe email will also become increasingly associated with communicating on serious matters, or with people you are not so close to. That will be a loss because people will de-learn all the skills they had acquired in the 1990’s in expressing intimate thoughts in writing.

What about blogs ? Telephone is great for reaching to the people you know, but blogs and discussion forums enable one to meet new people – and the beauty of it is that, unlike cocktails, where you first see a pretty head, and say “hi” and then don’t know what to say next, here you know right away that the other person in the forum is into thai food, which is wonderful if you like this too. The only problem is that you don’t know whether you are talking to a pretty head or to a convict in Sing Sing.

The great battle of our times is about meaning. The more the web is like a school playground at noon, with children playing everywhere, the more hope there is. But if the schoolmaster succeeds in having drill maneuvers at noon, so that children can get physical exercise in the correct manner, instead of wasteful and dangerous playing activities, then we are truly lost. Or if the children themselves, instead of playing around, just sit there fiddling at GameBoys, then we are also lost.

I can’t resist the pleasure of adorning my blog with this gem of French poetry, the last part of Booz Endormi , in La Légende des Siècles by Victor Hugo. The first part is already glorious, there is the description of Booz’s uprightedness ( "il était vêtu de probité et de lin propre", which has entered the language), and his amazement at his dream, of a great tree sprouting up from his tired body ( "Un roi chantait en bas, en haut mourait un Dieu") : "Une race naitrait de moi !" "Quand on est jeune, on a des matins glorieux" " Je suis vieux, Seigneur, et mon âme penche vers le tombeau/ comme un boeuf vers le ruisseau). Dazed by his dream, he does not notice Ruth, his kinswoman, who has come to lie down at his feet, in the hope of being taken as his wife. Then Hugo wraps up of one his greatest poems by an entrancingly beautiful evocation of a nocturnal atmosphere:

"L’ombre était nuptiale, auguste et solenelle
Les anges y volaient sans doute obscurément
Car on voyait passer dans la nuit, par moment,
Quelque chose de bleu qui paraissait une aile

La respiration de Booz qui dormait
Se mêlait au bruit sourd des ruisseaux dans la mousse.
On était dans le mois où la nature est douce
Les collines ayant des lys sur leur sommet

Ruth songeait et Booz dormait; l’herbe était noire;
Les grelots des troupeaux palpitaient vaguement;
Une immense bonté tombait du firmament;
C’était l’heure tranquille où les lions vont boire.

Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth
Les astres émallaient le ciel profond et sombre;
Le croissant fin et clair parmi ces fleurs de l’ombre
Brillait à l’occident, et Ruth se demandait,

Immobile, ouvrant l’oeil à moitié sous les voiles,
Quel dieu, quel moissoneur de l’éternel été
Avait, en s’en allant, négligemment jeté
Cette faucille d’or dans le champ des étoiles"

( from a letter, written in Summer 1999, in Beijing)

Here,life goes on its own sleepy space. Beijing also has been under a heat wave, and looking at old chinese people sitting under the shade fanning themselves made me feel very like I was back in Port Louis. But here it is different, in the sense that I feel a liking for the people, whereas back in Port Louis, I would walk in Chinatown, see the sights, smell its strange smells, a mixture of dust and eucalyptus oil, and taste the food, but it remained a bit alien. Diaspora Chinese are rather distant people. In Mauritius, I’ve had long, close friendships with Creoles and Muslims, I’ve been to their places, gone to church and mosque with them, and generally spent so much time in their company that I can safely say that a little bit of me is Creole and Muslim. But the Chinese kept to themselves. The other day, I was speaking to a sino-mauritian, like we call them, who lives here. I said: "So, you’re from Port Louis. Maybe you know my father’s family, they were from Madame Street, near the pagoda.." She said: "We were very Chinese, in my family…", meaning by that, that they knew only Chinese people.
But here, like I was saying before, it is impossible not to like them after some time. They are a warm, welcoming people, although it takes some time to get used to their crude manners. Most of them look like they are fresh from the villages. Also, the Red Guards crushed the old middle class during the Cultural Revolution, and condemned all forms of bourgeois behaviour. So, the working class lost that elite whose manners they could have taken on. And as for the nouveaux riches who have appeared since the early 80’s, they imitate American manners, which only makes things worse.
Despite the Chinese in mauritius generally being an aloof bunch, still, China was part of that kaleidoscope of cultures I grew in, but as a distant star. My neighbourhood friend was a Muslim, and I remember eating beef once at his place when I was small, which is forbidden for us. The house behind mine was that of a mulatto, who spoke english to her dogs for one week everytime she came back from visiting her son in Australia. China only came to the fore whenever we went to visit my mother’s family in Port Louis.
Port Louis, boiling in its hyper humid bay surrounded by hills was a rather strange, fascinating place for me. I have ever since been using images from my childhood visits there in my writing. But if I could paint, I would have liked to paint a huge, crowded, picture in the naïve style, like the folk painters in Haiti, showing the people of Port Louis, in the 70’s.
In that picture, somwhere near the centre you would have the pot holed streets in the northern part of Port Louis, with afro-hair style creoles hanging around near little tin-and-wood shops. In the 70’s when I was a kid, afro hairdos were in fashion. I was frightened of ,yet fascinated by the creoles in Port Louis loitering near my grandmother’s place, with their huge James Brown heads, open shirts, big gold-plated chains, platform shoes. They radiated sexuality and danger. Their women had short skirts and a defiant come-get-me-if-you-can look. The men flicked a knife at you, gangster-style, if you looked for trouble with them. Then somewhere a bit to the south of the creoles, in the picture, you would see a hindu temple, with a pink dome half hidden by trees. The street where my grandmother lived was almost an indian village, and the temple near her house was a quiet place with a big banyan tree whose trunk was surrounded by the threads tied by people who had made vows ("promesses"), and the priest was an old brahmin who could interprete dreams and cast horoscopes.
My grand mother’s place was also a quiet little house made of iron leaves and wood. Near one of the doorstep, one could see a bit of a old newspaper which had been pasted on a wooden rafter to protect it from rotting. It started with: "The Allied met yesterday in Tehran…" but I don’t remember the rest. My grand parents were pious people, and you could see old hindi books on the shelves and a painting of Krishna bought from the bazaar on the walls, but one room had a different atmosphere. That was S..’s room. He was my mother’s little brother, a bachelor, with bad habits.
That room had pin ups on its walls, beer bottles, an ashtray, and there were always some comic books on the bed, some for children, some for adults. Looking out by the window, I would see my uncle S... squatting by the roadside with the creoles, drinking beer with them. Many of the comic books were westerns. Westerns were in their last days of fashion – Clint Eastwood, especially. The young crowded in the hot moist cinemas in Port Louis to see them. Looking beyond my uncle having his beer, I would see a dry yellow hill – Port Louis is surrounded by a U-shaped chain of hills. That hill was always dry and dusty, and it looked like the canyons in the Westerns. Even now, when I see that hill, I think of cowboys and apaches. So, in my imaginary picture, I would have , to the left of the creoles near their shop, a yellow hill
with Geronimo at its top.
There was another hill, touching the dry one. That one was always very green. It was covered with a thick forest - it received the rains coming from the central plateau of the island. It was rather high, and the clouds often gathered around its summit, which was like a thumb – it is called Montagne Le Pouce. That one, I associated with the war in Vietnam, because in another of the comic books in S...’s room, I once saw american planes flying around jungle covered hills which looked strikingly like Le Pouce.
So, in my picture, you’d have, a bit above my grandmother’s house, a green thumb-like hill with jet planes flying around it, throwing bombs. And, running out of the house by one of its doors, there would be a naked girl hiding her limbs with a bedsheet.
That would be not an allusion to the famous war photo of the little vietnamese girl running naked from the american bombs, but to one visit my mother made to the house, after her parents’ death, where she fell upon a girl whom her brother had brought to his room. She chased her out of the place.
This is a long digression, but I am presenting first the other elements of the picture then I will last talk of China, which comes at the South East of the house.
Further South of the house, coming out of the Hindu temple, you would see a cavadee procession. The cavadee is a feast of penance and vow-taking made in honour of Muruga, the son of Shiva. On that day, the penitent, after having maintained abstinence and vegetarianism for eight days, pierce their chest and arms with little needles to form the pattern of a peacock fanning his tail, the peacock being dear to Muruga, and carry on their back a miniature Muruga temple with a wooden frame covered with flowers on a long procession. My uncle S..., for all his bad boy habits, often carried the cavadee. Let’s follow the penitents.
Coming out of the temple, they lounge the border of the muslim quarter of Port Louis. That is to the left of my grandmother’s house in the picture, and I paint it as a casbah of white little cubes crowding each other, a bit like the old towns in Algeria. Do you remember the story of Naushad and Ayesha I gave you? Ayesha was a surtee, one of the rich trading families from Surat, near Pakistan The surtees are a beautiful people, a handsome mixture of persian, indian and arabic, and if you are walking in the surtee section of the muslim quarter, through which the cavadee procession is presently passing, sometimes a breath-taking beauty from the Arabian nights may pass by you on the street. So, let’s have a languid eyed shaheen (queen) peeking at the procession from the balcony of her opulent house. And notice the little wizened figure with a skullcap observing the procession from the door of the mosque. That’s the mullah, who is carefully looking at the faces of the penitent, to check whether none of the Faithful is indulging in these abominable bhut-parast (idolaters) practices.
And now the procession enters Sun Yat Sen Street. The children of the Middle Kingdom are, appropriately enough, right in the middle of Port Louis, and they look with amusement at the strange procession. The Mauritian chinese are only faintly interested in the other cultures on the island, and that kind of flamboyant penitence – at that stage many in the procession have fallen into a trance and are dancing ecstatically – is not to their taste anyway.
The Chinese. Like I’ve been saying before, they have meant little to me. I have been madly in love with a muslim girl, whose father, incidentally, finances a good part of the running costs of the mosque in front of which the procession passed earlier on, and even if I was jilted, she unintentionally set into motion a chain of events in my life which is still unfolding. It was following the advice of another girl that I once became a journalist. But when it comes to the Chinese, I have only a few stray images.
I remember my mother telling me, one rainy day, in the streets of Port Louis: "Guette enn bonnefemme in mette kabai" ("Look at that old woman. She is wearing the kabai") –effectively, among the passer-bys, I saw a bent old little chinese woman wearing the kabai, the traditional blue shirt-and-trousers worn by chinese peasants. I don’t know if she was carrying the bamboo pole with two baskets hanging at each end, or if my imagination is adding things to my memory.
I also remember, in a very old Chinese shop, a dusty red framed picture of Sun Yat Sen. He was sitting with his back very straight, in an austere setting. It looked very ancient. It reminded of the pictures of Nehru and Gandhi, which you could still see in the waiting room of any old Indian lawyer or doctor in the 70’s in Mauritius.
The idea of dust often came to my mind when I thought of China. Chinese historical films were often filmed in the arid provinces of Shanxi and Kansu, near the desert, since the stories of "old" China often occured in these places. Looking at those places, one had the feeling that China was a drab, dusty land, a bit sad. I haven’t yet been far outside Beijing, so I can’t say if it’s true. The rare old buildings one may see in Beijing, apart from those in the Forbidden City are big grey stoned houses, with the typical horned roofs, military looking in aspect, which goes in well with the rather sad "siberian" looking vegetation in the region – there are lots of pines here, and other severe-looking trees whose name I don’t know , but which all make me think of Russia.
The problem is that, already, I am starting to pick up the regional stereotypes, and stereotypes are hard to get rid of. In this case, l’idée reçue is that North China, where I am, is the "old" China, especially Shanxi province, a bit to the east of Beijing. The North is where the imperial capitals have traditionally being located. It is said to be more intellectual and conservative. These grey buildings do have an austere aspect, with their crenellated walls. It seems like a land of soldiers. Northern India also has that imperial character: a vast plain dotted with forts, castles and ancient battlefields. The North is said to be a bit narcissic: the emblematic image here is that of a chinese soldier in armour standing sentry over the Great Wall.
South China, on the other hand, is a gay tropical country, of great natural beauty. Here in the market we get mangoes and litchis from the South, and they evoke images of sandy beaches, cyclones, tropical jungles, all of which ye may find downe there. The South, with its long tradition of commerce with the rest of the world, is said to be more open to change from outside. The fact that it is where the boom started in the 80’s reinforces the stereotype.

A lazy winding conversation in the beginning of the afternoon

The other day, on a hot sleepy beginning of the afternoon, I was talking with Miss G., our young, and quite pretty, typist cum translator. Beijing was nodding, reminding itself with difficulty that Deng Xiaoping had abolished the old chinese custom of the one o’clock siesta ( but when I phoned Wuhan University, in Hubei Province, to talk to a friend, the girl at the other end of the line said– "Everyone’s sleeping here! We open again at three!", a reminder that Beijing’s imperial edicts are often disregarded by the rest of the country. Just like in India, where a provincial administrator will often quip: "Dilli door hein"- Delhi is far away )
I am reproducing bits of our conversation.
She:- "So did you go to the Fragrant Hills in the weekend?"
Me: -Yes! It was nice!" (actually it was raining. But still it was good to be a little bit out of beijing).
-You took the cable car to the top?"
-No, I walked up. I met a French family on the way. They are in Beijing for a few days, then they are going to Mongolia to do horseriding" Those crazy french.
-Oh! Really!"
-Is it safe there in Mongolia?"
-Of course it is. They are very warm people. But very rough" (coming from a chinese, means they are really very warm and rough)
-Oh. I know little about Mongolia. Do they look like the chinese?"
-Yes, they do (after a bit of reflection) Their skin is less smooth"
-How so?
-It’s a very windy country.."
-When I think of the mongolians, I think of very strong warriors, on horseback.. with moustaches"
-But that was in ancient times. I had mongolian friends at the university. They were good people..and Mongolia was part of China before, during the Yuan and Qin dynasties" now the Yuan were a mongolian dynasty, so it was rather China which was part of Mongolia, but I did not want to offend her by making that correction. Chinese people are terribly sensitive about their country. Which is one more reason why it is extremely difficult to discuss politics with them. Not only would it be dangerous for them, but also they are often too proud to admit to a foreigner that they are unsatisfied with the state of things.
She continued: "So that before, with Mongolia, China was shaped like a cow" I tried to imagine an old Qin dinasty map of China but could only conjure up images of Tintin, of japanese soldiers and of the streets of Shanghai and Kunming as described in an old english travel book I had read in a house boat on the Dal lake in Kashmir, last year, none of which images correspond to the times of the Qin dinasty.
She added: "Now, China is shaped like a rooster" ( the head being Manchuria and the tail being Xinjiang province) and continued "So, people say, the cow is a peaceful animal, which is why China was…" she hesitated.
-Dominated by foreigners?"
-Yes. But the rooster is very.." she looked for the word
-Proud? Likes to fight?"
-Mmmm , yes"
The Chinese have that thing about the "power" of animals, and plants. It is not a coincidence that the chinese horoscope is made up of animals. What she said reminded me of two things. The first one was an article I had read about the golden dragon fish. The dragon fish ( I think that is its name) is a very old species of fish, with no dorsal fin. It has a smooth gliding way of moving in the water, which can be quite hypnotic. The chinese have great respect for it, and can pay millions to get the red or golden variety, which are very rare. The article was about a young man in Hong Kong who had spent a huge fortune to buy a golden dragon fish. It was not for speculation. He said: "I love it. To have it for me is a blessing. I can watch it for hours. I have no doubt that it is a very old and wise fish, and I can feel it giving me protection" The man was not a soulful old chinese, on the contrary he was one of those bland utterly hollow looking young executives .
And the second thing was a little bit of a book I had been leafing through some time last year in a bookshop. It told how one day a great chinese wushu fighting nun ( wushu being what is known in the west, mistakenly, as kung fu) in shaolin, saw a great white heron near her window. She teased it by touching it with the end of her fighting stick. The heron smoothly pushed away the stick with the tip of its wing. Puzzled, she touched it again. The heron broke the stick with its beak. Whereupon, said the book, the Wushu master immediately understood that this was the spirit of a great animal who had come to visit her. She fell down on her knees, and the spirit of the heron entered her body, whereupon she was infused with its power, and became the first master of the Fighting Heron wushu style.
There is a streak of animism, I think, which runs in the Chinese soul. Strange, for such an old civilisation. And yet one more common point they have with the Indians.
-But I thought China looks like a dragon" I said. We looked at a map of China. "Look" I said, pointing to Manchuria – that looks like its mouth, its crest.."
-Yes, a bit"
-You have dragons for the rivers, the mountains, the air ?
-According to legends, dragons are in the water, and in the air. They are especially in the rivers, and in the sea"
-Like in the Chanjiang river ( the YangTseKiang)? So, when there are floods, it would mean the dragon is angry?"
-Especially when there are droughts. People then say, the dragon is burning the earth"
-And Sun Wu Kong ( the Dear Monkey King, much beloved of the Chinese– you remember the story I told you in my previous letter, about Sukumong’s fight against Heaven ) stole the magic stick from the dragon, right?
-Yes ! And he hid it behind his ear"
-Then he and Xuan Zang went to the West (India)…"
-Yes, he and Xuan Zang they went to find books. And they became…Fu " she looked for the word in the dictionary "Buddhas" she finally said. Having acquired merit by finding the books, the Monkey King and Xuan Zang became buddhas.
-But they went through a lot of adventures.."
-Eighty one"
-Oh? Exactly?
-Yes. Because the Chinese say that nine is the greatest number. So when we say 81, that is 9 by 9, that means the maximum. Xuan Zang and Sun Wu Kong were already buddhas when they were coming back from India. They were flying through the clouds. But Xuan Zang said: We have undergone 80 adventures. We have to go through one more, then our merit is complete. So they fell down on the earth, and had one last adventure"
-Oh. Very resolute’
-And in the Forbidden City, there are 999 and a half rooms" meaning, I guess, absolute perfection.
Then the phone rang and it was time to work again.

Les Chinois sont des Français qui ne le savent pas, ou est-ce l’inverse?

As you must have noticed, I have a habit of comparing the Chinese and the Indians. It’s automatic for me, because I’ve always thought of the Chinese as "our neighbours". Despite my mixed feelings about the sino-mauritians, I’ve always had great admiration for the mainland Chinese. I consider them as a brave people, who have always kept their head high through innumerable tragedies. A good many of the things I read about them came to me through the French.
I suspect French intellectuals, especially the right-wing variety, of having a deep fascination for China. De Gaulle certainly had. Both countries have a lot in common. They have a history of high centralisation, heavy bureaucracy and both are now nominally republics, but headed by Presidents who enjoy near monarchical power and prestige. They have a ritual attitude of reverence towards their literature ( the French, when speaking of Chateaubriand or Voltaire, will sometimes make a little bow and say : "comme disent les classiques". Like old chinese quoting Li Bao or Du Fu) and a deep inner conviction in the age-worn superiority of their civilisations. Was it a coincidence that the French sometimes talk of their writers as "les mandarins de la littérature"? And of course, both are stiffly proud of their cuisine.
The other day I was talking to a young Chinese from the bureaucracy who had just returned from a course at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration.
-Et avez vous été en stage en préfecture à la fin de votre cours, Mr H?
-Bien sur, bien sur, cher ami. J’ai travaillé durant deux mois comme adjoint au préfet du Pas de Calais. J’étais là-bas lorsqu’il y eut un accident dans l’euro- tunnel. Comme vous le savez sans doute, le service des pompes à incendie relève, en France, de la Préfecture. Je suis resté dans le tunnel, en compagnie de Monsieur le Préfet, pendant 36 heures, à diriger les opérations de secours. Ce fut fort intéressant".
Fort intéressant, indeed. Who else but the Chinese can instinctively grasp the complexities of French administration…
Both countries were the main land powers in their respective continents, and both are being outshone by countries over which they exercised cultural dominance in the past: Germany and Japan. And better have a good life insurance if you bluntly point that out to a Frenchman or a Chinese.
In this case, are the Japanese the Germans of Asia ? I rather tend to think of them as Asia’s british: stiff, formal, monarchical, looking down their nose at the yahoos on the Continent. But the Japanese have, like the Germans, a classless set of mind, a great tradition of consensus-seeking between syndicates, employers and government. I’m in two minds about their "European nationality" then.
India is the Asian Italy, I’m a bit more sure about that. Both are hot, corrupt, colourful and chaotic peninsulas. Theatrical, overemotional people. From India, buddhist monks spread the faith all over Asia, and from Rome , Christianity reached the farthest reaches of Europe.
About Spain, I would think of Indonesia, although Philippines has obvious credentials for that sobriquet. The Indonesians are a macho people, a bit death-seeking. The Koreans are the Dutch, a medium-sized, sea-faring nation. They have a family air with the Japanese, (like the Dutch with the Germans) but they don’t like to be told that, because they have suffered a lot from the Nippons.
Hong Kong is Monaco, a prosperous southern beauty spot living in symbiosis with a hulking China/France. Taiwan is Corsica, but a Corsica where the independentists have won. Rich, bland, boring Singapore is Luxembourg. Nepal is of course Switzerland.
But of course these comparisons have only limited value. The Chinese may have common points with the French, but there is one big difference between the two: the French, for all their hauteur, and streaks of xenophobia, are "condemned" to be a crossroads of cultures and of people, by reason of their prestige and location. In the last two centuries, they have received many migrants from Poland, Russia, Spain, Italy, North and West Africa. In the 30’s France was the second biggest immigrants destination in the world, after the United States. Culturally, Paris has always been a magnet for writers and artists. In the 30’s it was the American writers – Hemingway, Mc Fitzgerald. In the 50’s, the Africans – Césaire, Senghor. And, less well known, Paris has constantly been the home of many american jazzmen who later became famous in the States.
China, on the other hand, has not been blessed with that influx of foreign talent since many centuries, not since Chang’An ( now known as Xian) was the great metropolis of the Tang Dinasty, during China’s Golden Age.
Anyway, I’ve got to end the letter now. Cher ami, the letter you posted me this week should be at my doorstep some time next week, I guess. That will be a nice moment.

( Another letter from Beijing, also in 1999)

I'm listening again to a cd i had bought a few months ago. it's nice how when you listen to a tune you know, it brings back memories of the days when you had heard it for the first time. in the present case, the cd, despite its ghastly title of (i'm respecting the ortograph): "the moon reflected on the 2nd spring. it is the best of music television karaoke collections coppact disc" is actually a cd of classical tunes on the pipa ( a sort of luth). my favourite is "the autumn moon on the han palace", a lovely old melody full of nostalgia, which judging from its title, should be 'bout 1500 years old. it is a very popular tune, but it's not easy to play because, like debussy's "clair de lune", it requires heavy soaking by the performer in the highly romantic, very tender and delicate mood of the piece.another popular tune on that cd is "surrounded in ten directions", one of those melodies you'll hear everywhere in china if you spend a few days here, it's one of the staples of chinese classical music, like beethoven's 9th symphony in the West. It's about the death of a famous warrior at the end of the civil war period which preceded the founding of the han dynasty in the 3rd century bc. It's a tragic and powerful tune, a bit like the death of karna in the mahabharata would have sounded like if it had been put to music. interestingly, in that piece the pipa often sounds like the guitar background in sergio leone's westerns ( by the way, i loved that comment i read the other day about a japanese film where all the actors are intense, introverted types: "the dialogues are sparse words falling like rare dewdrops into a pool of silence, making slow and lengthy rings in it. it is like a Western where all the parts are played by clint eastwood").forget about the syrupy classical tunes they put as background music in chinese restaurants ( at least in mauritius): if that leads you to think that chinese classical music is the docile sort, you're dead wrong. the other day at the san wei bookstore ( a very studentish - chinese translations of derrida, sartre, joyce, proust and the rest on the ground floor - place, the first floor is a bit gauche with its puzzling sculptural hymns to maternity or whatever, but still a very nice hiding place on grey sunday afternoons) i too was tempted, after the first half of a cozy late night concert to conclude that the classical chinese musical heritage was a castrated repertoire of soporific tunes meant as background for the breast fondling afterdinner conversations of emperors with their concubines when suddenly, that evening's performer, a twenty year old guqin player, seemed to have an intuition of my thoughts and she suddenly embarked on the most amazingly brillant, tormented interpretation of a very strange piece, she tore at the strings, a lock of hair escaped from her hairpin and waved across her sweating brow, her eyes flashed wildly and the rather dumbfounded audience, to whom she had seemed up to then to be a slightly plump, not very bright looking, peach perfect product of some starchy conservatory, suddenly found themselves listening to what sounded like the musical rendition of a hurricane in the south china seas being played by a overpowering passionate woman of stunning beauty. i was chastened, even frightened.

--II--

( Part of an email sent to me by my friend Leonhard, during that same period – I’m sure he won’t mind):

Well then, let me give you Benjamin's code to begin with once I have the
book with me. It is really a beautiful insight into someone else's mind
to have their motives listed up so conveniently - inconveniently only for
Fouche's police, whom Constant in true French romantic cloak-and-dagger
style seems to have feared rather more dramatically than was perhaps necessary.
Nor was he in fact particularly good at tricking them, for while it may be a
clever idea to write your journal in cyphers, there is not much of a point
in doing so if then, for fear of forgetting the - fairly elaborate - code
yourself, you actually note it down on a page of the very diary. After
using this system for 3 years, in 1808 he must have got tired of it and
instead began to write the French text in greek characters, before finally
under the restauration he got so worried that he packed off the whole set
of diaries, gave them to a reliable swiss banker, immediately afterwards
forgot that man's name and never saw them again. Only when after his death
his heirs announced publication of his Oeuvres did the forgotten banker's
family remember the little treasure they held and sent it back to Paris -
to the benefit of, entr'autres, J. Christopher Herold from whose classic
life of Mme de Stael the following is taken. "The Code tells more of
Benjamin than anything else could in so little space:
1 Physical [i.e., sexual] pleasure.
2 Desire to break my eternal chain [with Mme de Stael].
3 Reconciliation with this bond, because of memories or a momentary charm.
4 Work.
5 Disputes with my father.
6 Tenderness for my father.
7 Travel projects.
8 Mariage projects.
9 Tired of Mrs Lindsay.
10 Sweet memories and revival of love for Mme Lindsay.
11 Irresolution in my projects with regard to Mme du Tertre.
12 Love for Mme du Tertre.
13 Indecision about everything.
14 Plan to settle at Dole [with his father] to break with Biondetta.
15 Plan to settle in Lausanne for the same purpose.
16 Projects for a voyage overseas [i.e., America] (1)
17 Desire to make up with certain enemies [i.e., Napoleon].
Numbers 9 and 10 gave Benjamin some slight trouble during his remaining
weeks in Paris. On July 3, after receiving a letter from Germaine which
prompted him to write fourteen 2's in a row, he left for Coppet."

This morning I was writing a short message to someone, and I had at one point, to make a choice between giving the sentence a striking effect, but one which could be somewhat offputting to the receiver, who could feel emotionally unsatisfied by it, and giving it a warmer touch, though losing the aesthetic impact. I chose the beautiful formula, and it did not go down too well with the receiver.
It is the curse of Enoch Powell, who in his famous speech on immigration, said that he saw "rivers of blood" if immigration continued unabated. He was referring to a passage in , I think, the Aenid, where a seer has a vision of a river turning to the colour of blood, as a presage of disaster. Powell, a haughty, brillant man, felt that his audience would understand his allusion, and if they didn’t , well they’d better get themselves an education . Of course, his audience preferred to straight away understand that he meant the rivers would be awash with the blood of civil war. He was termed an extremist and his political career went crashing down.
When you are in love with language, you could forget that apart from its intrinsic beauty it is a tool to talk to people, and the context can ask for platitudes, even outright lying. Even in the most perilous situations, say as a maitre de cérémonies at an occasion crammed with pompous fools, you utter your formulas ( "Thank you for your kind words. You have perfectly well expressed the feelings of all of us here tonight") with such a face and an undertone of irony that you kill the effect and send sniggers across the room. You have sold your soul to the language and you risk a life of solitude in a hut in the woods, amid yellow parchments, trying to transmute plain English into gold.
I am a latecomer to English, it still has the feeling of a foreign language to me and my vocabulary is limited – I keep a dictionary at hand. This morning I checked "tassel" and "brocade". My first love was French. One reason I loved that language was that as a child I used to watch the Reunion island television channel ( Reunion is the island next to ours, and it is a French département), primarily for the Japanese and American cartoons ( dubbed in French). Talk about a complicated world. At some point I picked up, in a box, a mouldy French history primer, which had been my mother’s back in the late 1940’s. On the cover was a pattern of field flowers, acorns and berries, and it said " Sur cette couverture tu vois les fruits et fleurs de la France. La France est ton pays, tu dois l’aimer de tout ton coeur" ( " On this cover you see the fruits and flowers of France. France is your country. You must love it with all your heart"). We were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in what had been a British colony from 1810 to 1968 ( it was a French colony before that). My family was of Indian origin like most of the population. I still remember what I read ( to be recited in your best sonorous voice):
"Alors Clothilde, qui était chrétienne, épousa Clovis, roi des Francs, qui était paien.
Alors Clovis s’en alla guerroyer contre les Alamands, sur le bord du Rhin, mais la bataille était fort rude
Alors Clovis leva les yeux vers le ciel, et s’écria: "Dieu de Clothilde, si tu me donnes cette victoire, je me fais chrétien"
Alors Dieu donna la victoire à la FRANCE"
( Then Clothilde , who was Christian, wed Clovis, king of the Franks, who was a pagan. The Clovis went to war against the Alamanic tribes, on the banks of the Rhine river, but the issue was uncertain. Then Clovis raised his eyes to the sky and shouted: "God of Clothilde, if you grant me victory, I shall make myself a Christian. Then God granted victory to France")
I also remember reading about Attila and Vercingetorix in that primer, which made me sneeze from its dust. Sometimes a silverfish wriggled away urgently, when one turned a page. On the television, they were showing Dallas. In my heart I rooted in for France. I was a bomb at Hindi, at school ( it was taught, but a pass mark was not obligatory to receive a Certificate of Primary Education), though I did learn the alphabet. The teacher laughed at me and said I was a Creole, the other big group in Mauritius. I did not like Bollywood movies, with the crying and dancing, and badly done fight scenes. It was a very televisual patriotism. I liked France, in part because French movies were better than Indian ones, and what I called French movies included Star Wars and Rambo ( dubbed in French in the local cinemas). For example when they showed the Star Trek series, but in the original American English, I watched it but with a feeling of painful struggle- I did not understand the accent, but then I have a difficulty understanding most accents in English, except BBC English. I watched it to look at Mr Spock’s ears, and in the hope of spectacular spaceship fights. But Star Trek was an altogether more cerebral affair than Star Wars and was lost on a kid of my age.
I also liked France because of the childrens’ books , which included Noddy , and the Famous Five ( all in the French versions). It is only recently that I realised that both were famous British children’s literature. It was then that I realised that the policeman in Toytown was a Bobby. I was dismayed, in part because, sometimes, I still have a slight feeling of apprehension when faced with things British. It has to do with the English movies they showed on television, and which my parents insisted I watch to improve my English. It was television versions of Victorian classics, surely very good ( donations from the British Council, probably) but which , to my eyes, featured extremely cold and pale people, clothed in black, in dark wood panelled rooms, and speaking in a tone of perpetual offense. The children looked like miniature adults, which was what children were supposed to look like, in those days.
I also remember picking up "Great Expectations" from a bookshelf when I was about nine. In a black and white illustration, next to the first page, was a drawing of a huge ugly man, strangling a boy, in a cemetery. The first paragraphs of the story said that the boy was named Pip, and that he had been set upon by a runaway prisoner, while passing by a cemetery. "Bring me food tonight" said the prisoner, " or else I shall come to your house, I shall eat your heart, I shall eat your liver".
In the middle of all this dread, I had also managed to understand, from watching French television programmes, that in the eyes of the French, the British were a sort of ironclad people, a race of men dwelling in a wet grey island, living on cold meat and hot water, unbeatable at war, however much one may have the advantage, at the last minute some dogged and implacable energy set into motion in their hearts, by which they eventually won the day. I also picked up the silly notion that British girls had horsy faces and wore dreadful clothes, and was surprised by their loveliness during my only, and short visit to England, a few years ago.
How come I am writing this blog in English then ? I came to love French partly because of Japanese cartoons, and Rambo and Star Wars. I switched to English, a few years ago, partly because I married a Chinese girl. Such is the world we live in. But there were also an undercurrent of interest for English. In the middle of adolescence ( a period, for me, more blurred than childhood, maybe because of its transitions and embarassments) I remember learning by heart poems by Keats and Byron, though it was in Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Proust and Flaubert that the greater part of my affections lay. Still, oddly, it is images from books in English that I remember vividly, as giving me a feeling of the beauty and vigour of the world outside my house, and of wanting to write about it. I remember the beads of sweat on the chest of the black fisherman, coming from a day’s work at the end of "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" by Mario Vargas Llossa ( a translation from the Spanish) , and Saleem listening to Tai the one toothed boatman’s fantastic stories, with their narrow Kashmiri boat slowly drawing a big "V" on Dal Lake, in the beginning of "Midnight’s Children" by Salman Rushdie. French literature is grand, but a brown man like me could not help being fascinated by Saleem’s adventures, or by those of the guide, the painter of signs and the talkative man in R.K. Narayan’s novels, and how not to fall at Ms Zadie Smith’s feet ? She is a dream, I have read "On Beauty" at one great gulp, barely stopping to drink water. "White Teeth" is my world, even if I don’t live in London.
English literature – the little I know of it – strikes me with an impression of swarming life, there is so much of it. Just American literature is already a colossus by itself. I remember noticing, when I watched "Apostrophes", the French television literary magazine, how, almost ritually, at one point, one of the ( French) writers had to pay hommage to William Faulkner. I also remember Bernard Pivot launching in a dithyrambic introduction of John Updike, his guest one evening, who went all red at the ears ( I did not know, at the time, who he was).
Then there is India, which keeps beaming out good writers ( in the last few years it was Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and others. Now Anita Desai’s daughter has won the Booker. And Pankaj Mishra looks promising).
And then there is what I am embarassed to call the "rest", because it is so inappropriate, but for want of a better term: Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, which punches way above its weight, Nigeria, Kenya and the rest of Anglophone Africa. And still there’s unplacable writers, like Kazuo Ishiguro.
But a slight problem remains : Mauritius is a French speaking island. English, though the official language, feels like a foreign language here. Also, I sometimes feel the swell of French in me, that extraordinary lyricism of Malraux, whom I read at 16 , an activity which should be forbidden for people below 30. He hits you in the brain like drinking absinth. " Car c’est en Inde que se sont le plus déployées les ailes nocturnes de l’humanité…", don’t ask me to translate that, I am unworthy. Or I see the steeple of the church of Cambray, in Du Coté de chez Swann.
But I guess I’ll have to make do with that. I am happy talking Creole and French in Mauritius, and learning Chinese, slowly, word by word, and reading and writing English, who is like a new girlfriend to me, or like a girl one whom one has married out of reason, though one does like her a lot.

I have been thinking about what I wrote in my previous post about beautiful women- ok, it was a bit silly, the lust and resentment showed through quite clearly, burning for an aloof type of beauty. Two words suffice: Catherine Deneuve. Snow maiden supreme, the cultivated object of lust for art film goers everywhere. A quick googling shows her as having played roles as a bisexual vampire in "The Hunger" and an "icy, sexually adventurous housewife" in "Belle de Jour" ( and obtained cult status in both roles).

Once she came to Mauritius and the television journalist interviewing her was actually stammering. The other day I read an interview of Camille Paglia where she said she once saw her in a department store, and she followed her, hiding behind shelves to snoop on her.
So, if a dominatrix like Ms Paglia loses her self control when faced with her, what do you expect from your humble servant, a founder/life member of Save the Nerds ( You Might Need Us to Write Your Love Letters) ? Should they teach courses at school on "How to deal with people radiating a higher form of eroticism than you can bear" ( in her case, you could add " and who personify a certain idea of France, or rather Paris" but that’s another story. Amazing, though, the degree of personification. It’s as if the 16th arrondissement had become a woman. And yes, she was born in Paris).

But really, if we have wine tasting courses, why don’t people give courses in eroticism ? How to differentiate between the different types of erotic impulses, how they correspond to different feelings , Latin hot ( Penelope Cruz, tequila shots, salsa music, brazilian food) , Japanese ( girly and fluffy on the surface, with very sharp desire beneath, like a hidden dagger) black ( in different aspects, the higher forms being Diana Ross singing "Baby Doll", Miles Davis playing "Kind of Blue", almost transcendentally stylish, for more rugged forms, see current rap video clips. Rural black, rough-hewn, teasing and sweating: early blues, sega dance and lyrics ), California look ( athletic, almost breathless kind of blonde girl with body perfectly shaped and tanned by endless swimming and aerobics. Is best expressed in Valspeak , like I mean, it was kind of great, you know, whatever, so that the vapidity of the language matches that of the erotic desire) Indian ( revolves around the sari, and what may be glimpsed underneath, a bit of cleavage, of teasingly twisted bare waist. Hair cut short or kept in a bun can reveal the back and neck to great advantage. A lot of repression involved, due to social convention, which can increase the libido to surprising heights), Celtic misty ( lying with one's head on the lap of a blonde girl , under a bent over Celtic cross, as she sings mournfully with a lyre, dark cliffs in the background – a diffuse eroticism, which can yet morph into gothic mood, cemetery at midnight, ghost of dead love takes possession of the body of one’s distant, conventional wife) Art Nouveau/ fin de siecle ( exquisite beauty, smell of something overripe, and of opium. Figure of Ophelia floating over the water. Eros and Thanatos in close embrace),Chinese ( the qipao, high necked and severe, yet close hugging, conventional yet sensual).
Some rather special atmospheres : the Godfather ( smell of tomato and olive coming from downstairs, sound of a baby crying somewhere in the large house, taut feeling of life and death in the air , making love like they will come and kill you tomorrow, prayer for a son afterwards) ,
Earth Mother Goddess ( making love, very slowly, to Angelina Jolie, on top of a mesa, in the middle of the Grand Canyon, and gazing at the stars afterwards), Versailles ( how did they get out of these things ?) 1960’s ( in the mud, with Jimi Hendrix breaking his Fender to pieces in the background)

More contemporary: pop/ rock ( the fading light from late evening autumn sky dimly lights the darkening bedroom, in which a short haired, flat chested girl delicately places an alight cigarette atop a pile of stubs, in an overflowing ashtray. She then looks at the palm of her hands, on which are tatooed, on the left: "Love" and on the right "Pain". After a moment of reflection, she picks up the cigarette, draws a last smoke out of it, and crushes it on the "o" of the "Love", while a teardrop runs down to the tip of her nose. Shades of metallic blue and grey. Heartbraking beauty in littered alleyways. Early death).

Urban ( office atmosphere, strong coffee, highly strung people , repressed sensuality, exploding in a kiss in the lift) - which brings us to sexual fantasies ( the lascivious secretary, etc). The course would not advocate indulgence. It would be a mental exploration of different erotic settings, help people to talk of repressed erotic feelings, and if necessary could lead to therapy, if it lays bare emotional or psychological issues.

It would also be interesting to explore the connections between the atmospheres. How celtic misty leads to art nouveau/fin de siecle ( early romanticism leading to symbolism and art decadent), and how both lead to pop/ rock: the figure of the brooding mysterious rock star ( Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison) goes back, through Baudelaire ( fin de siecle) to Byron, first pop icon of the modern era ( women literally threw themselves in his arms). Also explore sexual fantasies about people of other cultures ( and how they fantasise on us, and their own sexual fantasies within their culture). It would be a good prop for cultural studies.

But beyond that it would be a celebration of life, of the beauty of men and women. It could also lead to a higher awareness of death, the sister of eroticism. We always make love on the edge of a cliff. After all, exclaimed Sanskrit poet Bhartrhari:

"What is the use of many idle speeches !

Only two things are worth a man's attention-

the youth of full-breasted women, prone to fresh pleasures,

and the forest (*)"

(*) meaning, the life of the hermit

It could also lead to awareness of the flight of time, because , inevitably, to plunge in erotic fantasies involves bringing back memories of the first pangs of desire, towards a certain girl ( now fat, husband is a regular bonehead) and later towards other women ( where can they be, now ?) . "Ungrateful lover" exclaimed Prakrit poet Hala, 2000 years ago

" (...) still I see the mud

in the village street,

which, on a rainy night,

I trod for your sake, shameless one !"

Our mind has not yet digested the fact that the earth is round. We feel thrilled by Nehru’s statement, in his independence speech: "Tonight, when the world sleeps, India shall awake to its destiny", awed by a French travel writer’s imagining, while passing by Mecca at prayer time, of being " at the center of a vast corolla, spreading all over the world, of kneeling and rising figures", charmed by the title of a J.J. Goldman song : "Un dimanche soir sur la terre", with its evocation of a world plunged in the melancholy atmosphere of a Sunday evening.
How annoying, upon further thought, to have to acknowledge the fatal flaw at the heart of each of these statements. How annoying too, are time zones, removing our beloved ones from us not only in space, but in the time of daily life ( when we wake up, they are not doing the same, there).
The Copernican revolution was the first of the great mental revolutions. It is probably also the most disturbing in our idea of the world. The next one, in chronological order, was the Darwinian revolution. It is profoundly annoying to religious persons, but not all of us are like that. It can be very amusing to compare our manners with those of the great apes ( how fortunate, by the way, that the "violent ape" theory, which states that we are violent and militaristic apes, like the chimpanzees, is being challenged by observations of the bonobos, also our close cousins, yet peaceful and immensely fond of sex). Moreover, we do not often go to the zoo and hence rarely see our cousins, but we often lift our heads to gaze at the stars, and feel awed, yet a bit forlorn.
The next revolution, the Freudian one, has entered our daily language, yet it lacks the immediate appeal of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. With it, one enters the phase where conceptual revolutions become like great monuments that everyone passes by, but most people have only a vague figure of to whom they are dedicated to.
Thos becomes more obvious with the Einsteinian revolution, around which there floats the myth that only twelve people in the world understand what it is about. Everyone has heard of E= MC2, but even to go on Wikipedia to try to know more about it smacks of presumption. It is like a remote, frozen planet in our cultural universe, understood only by some specialists, and the stories they tell are so fantastic – of a particle passing through two points in space at the same time, of a phenomenon being influenced by the fact of beng observed – that one cannot help shrugging one’s shoulders. It is as if scientists had taken leave of their common sense.
But this is precisely the pattern made by scientific revolutions through time : as human beings, we seem to be predisposed to believe that the earth is flat, that the sun and other stars move around it, that there is a God, who created us in his image, that we are the wisest creatures in the universe, and that the objects around us obey to certain laws, like they cannot go through two doors at the same time. This is the way the world should be. And this is exactly what the scientific revolutions have been dismantling through history.
Like an animal keeper in a zoo who feeds and cleans a chimpanzee, but torments him by forever changing his cage, with each one more uncomfortable than the other, Science has given us running water and antibiotics, but it keeps givng us a less and less human-friendly vision of the world and, like the chimpanzee, we have grown silently resentful of it while still being dependent of it.
The coming scientific revolutions ( for now is no longer the time of the solitary geniuses, when the world can be thrown out of kelter by an Einstein scribbing an equation on the back of an envelope; nowadays scientific research is undertaken by large well funded teams, their every progress made known to the world by specialised reporters) are anticipated by something approaching dread, like the knowledge that next autumn one will be sent to a renowned, yet particularly awful boarding school, and after this, one shall no longer be a child. Yet the simile is not appropriate: a little boy wants to grow up, even as he dreads the moment of leaving his childhood, for he knows, by observation of older children, that they have become strong, beautiful and full of knowledge. What the future scientific revolutions promise to offer has the feeling of gifts meant to improve one, yet that could go horribly wrong: genetic manipulation , artifical intelligence. One wishes one’s parents didn’t try so hard to give one the very best there is on the market.

-II-

Sometimes writers make broad sweeping statements in a striking and beautiful manner, leaving us with an odd mixture of feelings. It has to do with the mood in which we are reading . When we plunge in a novel, we go back to that eager we had as children listening to a bed time story – we recreate the dim lights, the way the words rang in the room, how one’s parent’s hands flew about, throwing stark shadows on the walls. We are thrilled to let our imagination to take over control of our mind. It wants to rest from reality. Fiction is fuzzy, warm and ordered. Reality is cold, blurred and incoherent – after jogging, having reached the place where the footpath meets the highway, one’s mind was clean and sharp from the physical exercice, taking in things with sharpness – and what it saw in the dimming light was cars zipping by, the tangled bush atop the pile of rocks, and the unlovely sugarcane, a bland, metallic taste to things, like when, as a child, one stuck a spoon in one’s mouth to see how it tastes. One suddenly has a recollection of passing by a clerk’s office in a hospital one day – the horror of administrative blandness , the world of file drawers and memoranda, piled upon the blank, one dimensional world of the hospital, in which everything is exactly what it is, and nothing else, a chair is a chair, a bed is a bed, you are a body about to undergo an operation.
Fiction is respite from this blandness of the world, it is a sweet overgrowing of ivy over the ugly concrete wall. Going beyond the cozy feeling of listening to a bedtime story, it can obtain the vividness of the dream state, where a special atmosphere pervades everything, and the most banal actions we do, or objects we see, seem imbued with a profound meaning,. Natasha dancing with Prince Andre, in War and Peace, or Joseph K… waking up in the first line of The Trial , to find that he is going to be arrested ( Kafka’s novels are especially strong in creating this dream atmosphere).
In the middle of this, suddenly drops in the authorial voice, like, in the middle of a dream one hears the newscaster telling us good morning at seven o’clock as the radio alarm goes on. Normally, it wakes one up, breaking the pleasant feeling. But sometimes, the voice of the newscaster blends in the dream which goes on for a few more moments. The newscaster is talking of serious worldly events and we are interpreting them within the world of the dream.
I felt this the other day when, while reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography ( "Living to tell the tale") I came by his statement, while describing how he grew among women , of how "this gave me the strong feeling that it is women who run the world, endlessly tending and repairing it while we men always destroy it by our brutality". Coming as it did, steeped in a magic atmosphere ( he had, before, given a moving description of his elder aunt in the room next to his, of her eyes, her smell and her clumsy gait, only to reveal that at the last line that, according to his mother, he could not possibly have known so much about her, as she had died before his birth), I took it as uncovering a profoundly buried truth. Later, I poked holes in it – it was only true in so far as we would see the world as a sort of house, which women keep neat and tidy, and in which men are naughty boys forever breaking the vase in the living room. There was something inert about this vision. Yet something of the flavour of an occult secret revealed, still clings to it.
Another authorial statement I once heard, puzzled me –and I guess, shall do so to the end of my days, for it is an unsolvable mystery. I forget which author it was, and he ( I think it was a man) said : " She was very beautiful, and like all great beauties, unhappy, for such women attract only the worst kind of men. The others feel unworthy". What mixed feelings this hit me with ! First of all, glee: serves them right ! Followed by envy towards the author: how many beautiful women does he know, that he can say this with such confidence ? I know nothing about very beautiful women. There are not so many of them, and they are rarely alone. I have never gone to talk to one. Ha ! This proves the author’s point, then: I feel shy towards them, and I am a good man ( I am sure I am). Therefore, good men do avert their gaze from very beautiful women, these overbright suns which end up clouded by a nebula of bitchy girlfriends and medallion men.
As they drive their sports cars, gifts of shark toothed lawyer boyfriends and sugardaddies, little can they guess how, like the Chorus in a Greek tragedy, their Fate- like crochety aunts are already prophesying their doom at Sunday reunions, while their spider like, cardigan –knitting fingers undo a loop with vicious ease. Soon, the overdone wedding with a loudmouthed property developer, too soon, the lonely evenings as he spends more and more time with mistresses – on the king size bed, her tears, melting on the linen sheets, join those of her sister souls in time, the dancing girls in the palaces of the kings of before, to form a river of sorrowful beauty.
Yet doubt persists. How can the author be so sure ? How many beautiful women can he know, anyway ? After all, he is only a writer, not a casino tycoon. What kind of world would it be, in which Angelina Jolie married the scriptwriter of Mr and Mrs Smith, instead of marrying Brad Pitt ? Marilyn Monroe doesn’t count, the proof of her being crazy was that she married Arthur Miller and tried to become a geek too. Ok, this is too nasty. Let us count, then. Marilyn Monroe makes one. Juliette Recamier counts two, although Chateaubriand was noble and glamorous apart from being a writer. Graham Greene also had an affair with a beautiful woman, whose name I cannot remember. That’s three. This is a catch 22 situation: if I can make this list long enough, it means that beautiful glamorous women can go out with writers, which means the guy who wrote the lines above would have known enough to write these lines. If I do not get enough, it means that they do not, and that the writer is right in his estimation that beauty is an exile on a lonely island, in which one ends up mating with gorillas. But wait a minute, if I do get enough names, in the list, how come the writer would still have written those lines, unless writers themselves also counted as "the worst of men". Ach, what an annoyance his statement has proved to be.

-II-

The other day I had an interesting discussion with some friends regarding an article entitled "Are we Indians mediocre?" at the link below :

http://www.desijournal.com/article_print.asp?ArticleId=243

What my friends said, to sum up a long discussion, was that Indian creativity is handicapped by two factors, one cultural and the other socio-economic.
Most Indians, they argued, do not really understand Western culture. The intellectuals do, but not the normal middle class Indians. The latter are very good at learning the technical skills of Western technology. They are also very fond, in their youth, of the trashy entertainments of pop culture, both the Indian and the Western type – pop music, television, computer games and chat. If they go to Europe, they will be happy to visit museums, shopping malls and amusement parks. But the philosophical basis of Western culture remains foreign to them – its trust in man’s reason and wisdom, its emphasis on the development of man’s analytical and creative faculties, as well as his physical faculties through sports. Its strong sense of curiosity and wonder at the world. Unfortunately, even when doing very well at learning science, such Indians do not understand the other leg upon which rests Western culture, which is the humanities. Yet the humanities are crucial to appreciating the world, for they give one three great skills in this respect: character, proportion and background.

Character – a sense of individuality and energy in any idea
Proportion – it can be the sense of ethical proportion ( justice) or the sense of aesthetic proportion ( beauty). There is a dialectic between character and proportion. Character is an active principle, a breaking out into the world. Any strong personality starts by being biased, opiniated. Proportion is a static principle. A great work of art is in a state of equilibrium, its strong lines of force finely balanced.
Background – is, simply, the background : a great mass of cultural and historical knowledge. The background feeds the foreground, knowing more tends to strengthen one’s appreciation of things, provided one has character and proportion.

The problem with ignoring the humanities is that one tends to fall in the divinities. As our Indian grows in age, and that the allure of pop culture fades, he withdraws into a life of arranged marriage, work and puja, with maybe watching some Bollywood movie by way of spicying up his life. He even starts to dislike Western culture as being hedonistic and materialistic. But he never realises that beyond this vulgar aspect of Western culture, there exists a noble philosophy, which is the source of all the West’s wealth, greatness and sophistication: a culture of questioning ( "sapere aude", have the courage to know, was how Kant defined the Age of Enlightenment) and exploration.
As long as the average Indian ignores these fundamental aspects of Western culture, it will be difficult for India to be as brillant and creative as the West. It can be a great factory of medium quality goods, and a great outsourcing destination, but it cannot match the love of life which makes the West shine in sports, culture and science. India will prefer to wrap itself in the routine of work, ritual, and some Bollywood dreaming on the side.

The socio- economic aspect is linked to the caste system. The latter tends to be seen as a cultural phenomenon, but it is also pretty much a socio-economic system, whereby the Dalits ( untouchables) are landless labourers, who work for intermediate farmers ( of the Shudra caste) and large landlords ( usually upper caste). Such a feudal agrarian system demands that the Dalits be kept ignorant and docile, and India’s elitist education system serves it well, with its emphasis on elite universities, and its neglect of primary education, especially in the rural areas. Illiteracy in India is of more than 30 %, with far greater proportions among the Dalits.
Seeing things from the point of view of its landlords, India’s feudal agrarian system is working well. If it comes to having a modern industrial economy ( 19th century- 1950’s type), dependent on a moderately educated workforce, the waste in human resources is quite huge. If one thinks of "high modernity", the high technology industries such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, which need a highly educated workforce and a nexus of universities and research institutes like bubbling cauldrons of innovation, clearly the set up is not ideal. Yet India is doing well in the new technologies. Because of its size, even its elite population is big enough to create a dynamic in this respect. Also, the boom has been mostly in the south, where the society seems to be less feudal than in the north. India is large enough to contain both a booming IT sector, and Dalits for whom access to the village water tap is but a distant dream.
Apart from its enormous human suffering and waste of talent, the caste system also clogs up the politics and administration of India with its caste based politics, and its quotas for entry in the service. It distorts the life of most Indians by influencing their love life and their careers. It is clearly a great poison, like the pestilence which came from the sea of nectar during its churning by the gods and demons– and there is no Shivji to drink it.

About my friends' arguments: I guess many people will find the statement "Most Indians do not understand Western culture" quite infuriating and patronising. They could point out, for example, that many Westerners, especally the young are crassly ignorant of Western culture, and indeed of any culture, and end up as conformists and religious extremists. They could also point out that one does not need to be immersed in Werstern humanities to understand the concepts of character, proportion and background as these will also operate in non Western literatures. Therefore, someone could be immersed in Hindi literature and be greatly elegant and creative in thought.

I guess that what my friends are trying to say is that while they see India forgeing ahead in science and culture, and producing many brillant writers and thinkers at the top end, such as Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra, Amartya Sen, yet middle class India remains profoundly conformist in their eye. They believe this stifles India's creative energies.

Anyway, I found the argumentation interesting, so I decided to post it here. I guess it could bring in it strong reactions, but then the whole debate is a pretty challenging one.

(about my previous post) I guess the situation of our character, wandering in the lobby in the five star hotel, hesitant to join the ranks of the rich, would feel very odd to an American audience, if one goes by stereotypes about them. It is said that for Americans, wealth is the natural reward of hard work. Besides material enjoyment, wealth enables you to meet other hard working and intelligent persons like yourself, and the higher you go, the better the company gets. After all, at the very top, there sits Bill Gates, Steve Jobbs and other really really clever and good people. Whereas at the bottom, you'll have drug addicts and all the nasty boys who tripped and pinched you in the school courtyard.

I can't help feel attracted to a country that has produced such a philosophy, even when I have read about how in fact, the dices are loaded there as much as everywhere, the schools in the poor areas are decrepit, and the wealthy make it to Yale with awful high school grades, leaving the rest of us on the roadside, looking on, jaws agape. Yet there is such energy and optimism in such an outlook.

I guess one great charm of the US, on social matters, must be that, given the size and diversity of the country, there are countless ways there of being rich, or middle class ( I am not so sure about being poor, it looks like it's got two broad categories, either you're poor in the countryside, or you're poor in town, and that's it ). Even in a relatively smaller country like France, with a more rigid social system, you get interesting variations, subjects for social comedies. A small town doctor and a lecturer in a university town - the doctor is into full contact thai boxing, and has stuffed his head with all kind of supermarket buddhism ( " it's all got to do with inner strength, in the middle of the fight, in your moment of greatest danger, you can feel it rising, the energy pouring out , it's the satori, your chakras are opening, yes, yes, my master used to say...") . The lecturer is the sandal wearing type, tousled hair and beard, dirty pullover; a fossilised marxist, he still sends half his salary to finance the sandinistas in nicaragua. He, in a way, has also stuffed his head with marxism and cannot renounce it.

Another possibility: the lecturer earns a miserable living teaching sanskrit and writes poems in ancient greek on the side, as well as a historical novel taking place in 15 th century Dordogne, inspired by the correspondence left by an ancestor, which he has happened on ( he comes from countryside noblesse de robe, members of the old provincial Parlements ). However, as he writes the novel, he cannot help feeling that he could improve it if he twists it in a certain manner, by which his ancestor would turn out to be the villain. Should he sacrifice his ancestor’s reputation, for the sake of a good novel ? His passion for the past becomes a burden on him.

The doctor also comes from good, through not well off, gentry. He owns a vineyard, an expensive and time consuming passion. He and his wife are pillars of the local Catholic church, his daughter plays the piano. He earns a good income, yet barely enough to meet his commitments - the vineyard, the daughter's Catholic school – all of which are for the sake of keeping the family standards. He knows he should sacrifice the vineyard, yet hesitates – he himself disliked the Catholic school he went at. He feels the desire to take revenge on it, and to please himself, by keeping the vineyard and sacrificing the school seat.

In a society where food, shelter and clothing are cheap, people have greater leisure to create a persona. In a medieval society this was the priviledge of the rich, hence also their gorgeous clothes, while the poor were in uniform grey and brown rags.

To come back to our character, maybe this is what he intuitively realises, while sipping a daiqiri in the hotel's beach cafe. Money gives you the leisure to create yourself a personality. " I should be passionately into something. It will make me happy and I'll meet like minded people and make friends" Problem is, he was always the average Joe. He would come back from work, heat something in the microwave, watch something on television, or play a computer game, or chat on internet. He used to have a collection of matchbox cars. "I'm not going to set up the world's largest matchbox car museum. That would be ridiculous, it would be just like what I suspected, rich people are maniacs. Anyway I don't like matchbox cars to that extent. So, what is I really like ?" he wonders.

A possible story: a middleclass fellow goes on a trip, at vertiginous speed through the social classes, crashing through the glass ceilings within a few months. Joe , average Joe, travelling salesman for an insurance company loses his job one day when the said company goes bankrupt . Most of his savings were in a fund held by his company, so he has just enough money left to move to a rougher part of town and take up a job as a milkman. His/her friends trying to persuade him and themselves that they still value him for his personality, but they rapidly stop going to see him because they don't like the area he now lives in, so unsafe, and they don't invite him out either because he can't afford to buy a drink at the pub they usually go to. Suddenly, for some reason, another fall down one crucial level, from being working poor to being a handout receiver (that terrible dip below the surface of society . Those above you - that is all almost everyone, even the working poor - now don't talk to you anymore, they only give, or refuse to give. What is terrible is the silence, like being very deep under the water. He starts to understand why the bums living in cardboards keep shouting nonsense at themselves, and other bums, to create an illusion of dialogue. There is food and warm beds in the charity homes, but the handout receiver is an exile far away from humanity. Even a murderer, fresh out of jail, could get some grudging respect, out of fear. But to have old ladies reading the Bible to you, and lecturing you about the importance of cleanliness. Even a poodle gets affection - you are less than that. Most of the bums are half mad. From there, after a few months, a sudden tug of the cord, and he goes up, up, up, crashing the glass ceilings from the bottom this time: he has picked up a lottery ticket with the big prize. A daze, a blur: he can barely breathe. Suddenly, he feels afraid: after these months of loneliness at the very bottom, would not being at the very top another sort of loneliness ? Maybe the very rich are also monomaniacs. He craves for familiar ground. So, he moves to another town, buys a nice middle class flat, clothes, car, and eventually gets back a nice middle class job like the one he used to have. And starts making friends who feel pretty much like the ones he used to have. However, various feelings start to nag him. A vague kind of guilt. Since I 've known poverty, shouldn't I, sort of, do something for them" Where to start ? The poor need friends, advice, but he's scared of going back there. Especially afraid of the bums. They live in the past, while their bodies are stuck in an eternal present, every day being like yesterday and the day before. Another irritant: having to pretend being middle class. One day he dates a woman, and brings her to an expensive french restaurant, and she thinks it is for a special occasion, - he's giong to ask her to marry him - in fact he just wanted to try the food. He hates going to that kind of place by himself - he is very afraid of being alone now, and dreads the thought of sitting by himself in that half lit restaurant, waiting for the snobbish waiter to bring the next course, feeling that everyone is watching him. And he does not want to date a rich woman either; he feels he would never really be at ease in that milieu , because he was not born into it, and came into it too late - and just after having been a bum. Taking a holiday, he stays in a five star hotel in the caribbeans, and realises that he still hates being in a hotel room at night as much as he used to, when he was a travelling salesman, and it makes no difference that this one is in a five star hotel. Who to talk to, either, during the day ? Ach, poor guy. Shall he have to resign himself to being rich ? Should he go into philantropy ? For which cause , how does one start redoing the world ? The poor children, the environment, AIDS. The bums he knew, they were out there for so many reasons - family quarrels, lost job ( just like him)... how to tackle this - go into politics ? This is a story that could on to many pages ! A possible twist: there then appears a government spokesman who tells him : "We know that you have won this lottery of many million dollars, though you insisted on keeping your anonymity. It is your patriotic duty to spend this money - we have a small economy , which has been languishing lately. Private vice, public virtue- spend, build yourself a palace, it shall stimulate the construction industry. Take up a chauffeur, cooks, gardeners, create jobs. Make yourself rich friends abroad, and then bring them home, good for our tourism industry, organise charity balls, our mundane life is moribund. The world needs rich people. If they did like you, that would bring the world economy crashing down".

I have been reading about feminism on the net, and have come across the idea , popular among some feminists, that more women should be at the head of governments because this will lead to a more peaceful world, given men's brutal instincts. I guess the people behind this idea have never been near a history book, or have never been in charge of any group of people. It is true that there is an agressive instinct among men, which will lead to fights and competition. But to imagine that the president of a country reacts to news of a border incident - a clash between two patrols - or to a report that country X is conducting trade dumping policy towards his own country, by an immediate macho let's crush their balls posture , is to betray a shocking ignorance of the power games inside states.

Suppose there is a border incident - "our " fishing boat was caught by "their" coast guard for fishing into their waters. The area in question is actually disputed. Immediately, everyone within the system starts shouting at the top of their voice. The tabloids go bersek. The fishermen communities ask for navy protection against this type of harassment. The industry guy says we must bear in mind the valuable cross border trade and investment opportunities in "their" country. The political advisor says that in view of coming partial elections in a conservative constituency, it may be good to look tough, within a certain limit. The diplomacy guy advises that the delivery of a note of protest, followed by a phone call to their president would be sufficient. After all, talks are still ongoing on the area under question, and should not be allowed to derail because of an isolated incident. And so on, every one chips in, defending his own turf. The president himself, is torn. His better angels tell him that the diplomat may be right. But a dark voice is also whispering that it may not be bad if relations with their country goes sour for some time, that would cancel the proposed investment trip to be led by the minister of finance and the minister of industry - these two have lately grown a bit uppity, have been making jokes in party circles about the old man losing his grip, that it is time for a change at the top.. it would be nice to clip their wings - the relations can always be repaired in good time... this is how politics work - everyone wants something from you, you also want something, at the same time, you are supposed to work for the benefit of others, not for yourself. There is the political cunning, but there is also what President Bush senior called "the vision thing" which means you must have (i) a vision (ii) the ability to realise the latter (iii) the ability to articulate this vision to the people. All this has nothing to do about being a man or a woman. Some people have the "political instinct". It is a fine balance: to be able to relate to the people, and to listen to advisors, yet without becoming fuzzy. To have political cunning, yet not become a Machiavillean figure. To have a vision, yet not become the preacher type.

Even in the premodern world, where things were supposedly more rough, where a king could simply order his armies to conquer other countries for the sake of his personal glory, things look pretty complex when you examine them closely. From the 15th century onwards, two great powers in Europe were in competition - the Habsurgs and France ( "the rivalry of a family and of a nation" as a historian put it) . Had there been only two such powers in Europe, maybe they would have reached balance. But of course, there were smaller states, and their internal problems would lead to wider conflicts. When Milan called for the assistance of France against Naples in 1494, this started a long war in Italy between the two powers. Similarly, the failure of the Spanish royal family to produce male heirs would produce repeated European wars, for both the Habsburgs and the Bourbons had valid claims to the succession, and none could afford the other having Spain as its ally, for this would strongly upset the balance. On top of it, Europe was not a stagnant entity. New religious currents, mixed up with the resistance of local nobility to the centralising tendencies of both Bourbons and Habsburgs would lead the French civil war, and the Thirty Years War. Then come economic developments- the struggle for the mastery of the seas and of commerce, both the Baltic sea route, and the Atlantic trade with the new world. In the middle of all this, one sees women rulers doing their bit of warfare just as much as their male counterparts - Elizabeth the First, Isabella of Castile, Bloody Mary, Catherine the Great.

Power is not some playgroundwhich enables one to indulge in some fancy games of toy soldiers. It is a crushing burden involving enormously complex decision making. The problem is that when it comes to history, most people are only familiar with the second world war, which is such an exception in history, because it involved a good side and a bad side, and thoroughly bizzare characters, Hitler and Mussolini, mad bloodthirsty clowns driven by strange dreams. Not to mention Stalin. They were brought to power by bad poetry: the obscene poetry of fascism and the dangerous naivete of communism. Unfortunately the world is not yet done with dangerously naive ideas, if now they tell you that's just a question of putting women at the top, and we will have a peaceful world.

Yesterday a friend was telling me about a visit he made a few years ago to a Buddhist temple in Peshawar. It was run by a former Muslim who had converted to Buddhism. He was together with some Africans and he said everyone felt dazed by the surreal quality of this visit. Here they were, in the heart of Pashtun territory, in Bin Laden land. Just round the corner was that famous bazaar where you can buy an armoured division and get a few Stinger missiles as small change, and they were sitting under a Buddha statue, listening to a sermon on right conduct. One of the Africans, a Sudanese and a devout muslim, was looking in utter amazement at the Buddha idols, the first he had ever seen in Pakistan.
I told my friend that maybe if someone asked this Sudanese about this visit, he would not at first remember having made it - he would need some prodding for his memory to bring it back. When something is too unforgettable, it becomes actually forgettable, because our sense of reality cannot deal with it, and puts it in a corner, under the item "Forteana".
In his foreword to "The Crucible" Arthur Miller says that we do not remember fear, maybe because to do so would be harmful to the brain. Hence, he says, he has difficulty remember remembering the exactly quality of the fear he felt during the Mc Carthy years, except that he knows it was it was there all the time.
Memory has a gland which secretes nostalgia. It is the oil in which float the pickles of memories – most memories, at least. It is a pretty mysterious human faculty. In one of Borges’s stories, a character is not surprised to come across a person able to predict the future. " After all" he reflects " That we possess memory – the capacity to retain the past- is already miraculous. Why not, then, be able to foresee the future ?" True, especially that precognition seems to be as capricious – or , maybe , obeys to laws as obscure as – memory.
There is a story about a tribe in Latin America, which lived on the coast. Once a European three mast dropped anchor well in sight of the village. It stayed there for a few weeks. Nobody in the village noticed it, because it was so beyond their expectation of normality – its size, its fantastic shape – that they could not really "see" it. It is probably a false story, and, like many false stories, has a seductive aspect to it. What if it was really possible that our brain filtered our perception of reality ?
One thing society does, to tame reality, is to put names to things. Actually, names started as generalisations. Tree englobes both pine trees and banana trees. Later, science told us that a banana tree is actually not a tree but a kind of giant grass, but even when we did not know it, banana "tree" worked as a fine and convenient way of naming the thing. Apart from the functionality, names have a reassuring quality. Walking among trees in a silent forest, or watching the leafless silhouette of one against the night sky, it is good to tell oneself that these are trees, it dispels the somewhat menacing air they could have, if not. When Gandalf and the Balrog fall through the mines of Moria, they pass by "nameless things" deep in the bowels of the earth.
Religion is, of course, the Great Explainer of reality. Fortunately, it has suffered some reversals in the past centuries, and new philosophies have been able to germinate, giving us alternative views of reality. Problem is, at the same time, we are suffering a serious problem in another front, which is that of memory. Gone are the days when children would recite whole chapters of Paradise Lost at one go. Not only do we not train our memories like before, but we stuff it with junk. In our year, the average televisionwatcher ingests as much fiction as the people before used to in a whole lifetime. Where does it all go, I wonder ? What if, one day, the walls holding our "remembering fiction" faculty burst, and the stuff overflowed in our memories of life ? Imagine having flashbacks of the day you killed JR, or of the night you left Ingrid Bergman on an airport runway. Unless, in that case, the "selective memory" function still worked, so that you would forget about what you did to JR, and remember everything about Ingrid.

Such perfume ! Yasunari Kawabata’s " The Dancer of Izu" and other stories ( I have just read it in French) spread a heady scent into the soul which stays on for days. It is sad to think of the poignant loneliness of the teenage narrator, a boy who had lost all his family, one member after the other, in his childhood ( this is not mentioned in the story, but one can safely assume that this is an autobiographical story). In another story ( " La lune dans l’eau’), a sick man watches the world from his bed using a mirror. His wife discovers that the world, as reflected in a mirror, has a beautiful sparkle to it: the sky has a shimmering blue, clouds are rimmed with shining white.
I have also been struck by this, recently. I was driving near the coast and the landscape seemed particularly beautiful, as seen from the rear mirror. And less so, to the naked eye. I was bringing some foreign friends along. On the evening of that day, they showed me the photos taken from their digital camera, which they had downloaded in the computer. As seen on the flat liquid crystal screen, the colours were gorgeous. The burnt red earth of the sugar cane fields, on which the spotted brown old stone walls arose, was like a thick red sauce in a witch’s cauldron. At the same time, they were seeing back what they had filmed on their camcorder. It was incredibly boring. These long shots of someone’s feet, followed by a groping and shaking blurred view of what had been a magnificent landscape. A waterfall, caught in a photo, is a drama of spray and frozen movement. On a camcorder, it is just a white line there against the cliff and you are catching all kinds of tourist comments as background noise.
Ok, so what pearl of wisdom can we obtain from the above ? I guess taking a photo gives you more leeway for on- the-spot dramatic embellishment – you can focus, and play a bit with light, and tell people to come closer. Of course, you can do the same with a camcorder, you can edit scenes, and redo the light but it’s more complicated. Like everybody else, I bought a camcorder when my boy was born, but I have been using more and more the digital camera.
To come back to Kawabata – I hope I can get hold of "Snow country" and "The Go Master" one day. The japaneseness of these titles ! " A Thousand Cranes ", "The rumbling of the mountain", "The Old Capital".

Since my boy was born, I have been asking my parents in law and my own parents about genealogical information, so that I can tell him about his ancestors later on. This morning my mother gave me a copy book in which an aunt of mine had once noted down some family lore told to her by my father’s maternal grandmother. Interesting catch. I notably learned that the sister of the mother of my father’s maternal grandmother had left the family because of quarrels with her sister in law and eventually became the mistress of a white man. She had three children, two daughters and a son. One of the girls became a catholic nun in a convent near Port Louis and she recently died ( I’ve been trying this afternnon to figure out which convent this could be).

A catholic nun ! I eagerly placed her image in my imaginary family photo album next to:

(i) the hindu mystic ( a cousin of my great grand father) who started the annual pilgrimage to Grand Bassin, for Maha Shivratree, having declared Grand Bassin to be linked to Ganga.

(ii) the kung fu master ( a brother of my wife’s paternal grand father) who fled the family home in Beijing, and after some time roaming in China, took up the study of kung fu, and eventually wrote a popular treatise on one of its styles. He used to tell my father in law to drop school and become his student. I heard a Chinese television station has made a documentary on him in recent years.

Another interesting peace of information I gathered is that my paternal grand father, who took up the profession of tailor at the age of 14, became attached, at one point, to a natak group, whose clothes he stitched and mended. What is interesting about this is that my father in law’s grandfather’s grandfather ran an embroidery shop specialised in costumes for Qing dynasty officials and Beijing opera actors. That was way back in 19th century Beijing. Two tailors – for – comedians in the family, O Cosmic Convergence.

( from a letter I sent to a friend, a few years back) You ask me about how I imagine God to be like. No joke, but I think of a pretty black hooker with an afro hairdo, in a dark alley, wearing a snakeskin miniskirt and fluffy pink blouse, with a big yellow pin on it saying : “Free Angela Davis”. She is smartly holding a cigarette and humming something with a husky voice. I think that image comes from a graffiti I once saw, saying: “God is black ! ” to which somebody else had added: “Yes, She is !”. Influenced by this image, I once depicted Shiva, in a story I never finished, as a smart black man, Marvin Gaye style, wearing an Armani suit, with neat dreadlocks, and a silver ring with a skull on it. He was the owner of an amusement park. He was soft spoken, moved with feline grace and a casual sort of authority among fire breathers, snake charmers and lion tamers. Parvati was a luscious blonde in a clinging red dress, à la Rita Hayworth, with long cigarette holder and gloves reaching her elbows.

You would think I am making fun of God, but I am not. I am attracted to the idea of God as an outsider, which is why I find the figure of Jesus appealing. But he talks too much, and gets very serious towards the end. I am not that much in tune either with Salman Rushdie’s depiction of God in one of his novels ( “ Exhausted, he fell on the bed. But at that moment, God appeared at the foot of the bed. He was in the form of a middle aged accountant, with a balding pate and a small pot belly. “What is happening, Lord ?” “Lots of problems yaar”) though it is engaging to imagine God as looking somehow like Woody Allen.

I imagine God – among - us as maybe the leader of a group of bums, jumping into cattle trains and eternally criss crossing the United States, from coast to coast. A medicine man in a small town in Congo, served by an old rusting steamer – interesting. A travelling vacuum cleaner salesman in Eastern Europe – not so much, too insecure and obsequious. God- with- us would be poor but pretty self confident. An eccentric circus manager in Siberia, whose performers would be tattooed ex cons, juggling with chainsaws, clowns twisting balloons into obscene shapes, alcoholic elephants ( they easily get addicted to booze) – we are getting there.

Vishnu has a cycle of incarnations, the boar, the tortoise, etc. The characters I am imagining would be for a cycle of incarnations of Shiva. Mahadev is the quintessencial outsider. He lives half naked in the Himalayas, and threads a necklace of human heads for his sharp fanged wife, At midnight, sitting on a burning funeral pyre, he drinks wine using the skull of his enemies as a cup, and smokes marijuana, in the company of ghosts and demons. At noon, he plays with children in the dust of the road. Shiv Shankar Bhagwan, the hoboe king, the African snake oil merchant, the Siberian circus manager with a Russian war song tatooed on his back. Or the disco king in a dingy night club, in a small town near the border with Mexico. He wears an Elvis outfit, complete with rhinestones and huge belt buckle, and sports a glistening hairdo. Parvati is the dance floor queen, a hard drinking middle aged latin dance teacher.

Vaishavism imagines God as transcendence. Vishnu coming down on earth would therefore bring with him something “from above” – a message, teachings, a model of behaviour. Hence the seriousness of Rama, and of Krishna, in his later years, when he teaches the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna. Saivism is an immanent religion. Shiva and Shakti pervade the world. In the puranas, when Parvati tells Shiva she wants a baby, he is reluctant: “Shiva is in every man, Shakti in every woman” he says, “why do we need a child ?”. Shiva’s avatars would therefore be like more incadescent bits of melting rock, in a flow of lava, or like the foam on the crest of a great wave, or sparks flying from two clashing swords – they belong to the world, but are overflowing , in a splendid manner , with the divine energy of creation which pervades everything. We have all met people like this, who “ate” life, who radiated sex, or beauty, who gave the impression that reality, around them, bends like a light wave does when passing near a massive star. We meet them more in high school than in college, because most can’t bear the treadmill and drop out. Hence the odd professions.

But some avatars would make it to college. One would be a former Indian Institute of Technology physics professor, who continuously comes up with theories on matter which could blow up the universe ( Bhava Bhayankar). He lives in a tent with his wife, a sublimely beautiful gypsy sorceress, and her tribe, which keeps moving to and fro in desert areas between India and Pakistan. The generals of both countries keep trying to lay hands on him, sending their best commando units in hot pursuit. But Parvati keeps a watchful eye and they come back wild eyed, and shaking, telling tales of having pursued over the dunes an ever receding gypsy camp, trembling in the hot air, in which a huge headed, pot bellied boy flew a kite – sometimes hovering just above their grasp – made of paper on which were scribbled equations – and at night an extraordinarily beautiful woman would dance by the fire, and even atop of it- her feet would send burning logs rolling over the sand, as she kicked and heaved, like a living tongue of fire, sometimes joined by her husband, a sort of hopping – bumping Einstein with a booming laugh. Attempts to interrogate the professor’s other son, a renowned piercing artist in Chennai, have proved unsuccessful – he seems immune to all forms of torture.

There would probably also be animal avatars- a wild mustang in Arizona – the Chinese imagine the Ying principle as “ a wild mare running all over the earth, uncatchable”, and the yang as “ a dragon rising over the horizon”.