Blowin' In The Wind

My wife arrives in Singapore

My wife flew in from Calcutta (Kolkata) yesterday to spend her summer holidays with me in Singapore now that her college has closed. She looked lovely in her new rimless glasses and a magenta silk sari. We will be together for three weeks.

We are meeting for the first time since October last year when we accompanied our son to Britain, where he spent a semester at a university.

He is now back in his college in America. He is spending the summer holidays working at a company about an hour's drive from his college. He last came home to Calcutta before going to Britain with us. We chat almost every day.

Now that my wife is here, I want to spend every moment of my free time with her.

There will be no more posts here until she returns to Calcutta in the third week of June.

Before and since Harry Potter

Book lovers will enjoy this trip down memory lane with Robert McCrum (left), who stepped down as literary editor of the Observer this month after 10 years on the job. McCrum, who has written about the English language (The Story of English) and a biography of PG Wodehouse (PG Wodehouse: A Life), writes about the changes in the publishing world. He joined the Observer in 1996, when publishing was still "a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink", and he is bowing out after seeing in the Kindle.

McCrum writes about how book blogs are growing in importance as newspapers shrink or altogether eliminate book reviews. And, of course, he notes the changing of the guard on the literary landscape: Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Iris Murdoch, Thom Gunn, Kurt Vonnegut, Ted Hughes were very much alive when he came in; now they are gone, replaced by a generation of writers: Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, Monica Ali and Kiran Desai are among the writers he mentions. A host of writers from non-English-speaking countries are among the most acclaimed writers in English today.

Malcolm Gladwell and The Tipping Point

McCrum's article offers valuable insights into the changes in the market. Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, for example, was "almost a flop", says McCrum, published to mixed reviews in 2000 but "saved by word of mouth". McCrum writes:

After a dismal launch, and as a desperate last resort, Gladwell persuaded his American publisher to sponsor a US-wide lecture tour. Only then did the book 'tip'. Eventually, it would become a literary success of its time, turn its author into a pop cultural guru and spend seven years on the New York Times bestseller list. This was one of those pivotal moments that illustrates the story of this decade.

Personally, I was rather disappointed with the book, which no doubt marks me as an old fogey. The book seemed too plain, without any intellectual excitement, to me, brought up on generations of wordsmiths from GK Chesterton (with whom McCrum starts the article) to Tom Wolfe. With advancing age, I now prefer the prose of Naipaul, Vikram Seth and Jhumpa Lahiri, though I still appreciate the stylistic feats of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie; but Gladwell, even for a New Yorker writer, is too understated for me. But The Tipping Point reflects this dot-com society, I guess, when things catch on suddenly out of the blue.

JK Rowling and Harry Potter

JK Rowling is a case in point. McCrum recalls Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had been published with a tiny first printing of 500 in 1997 to modest but enthusiastic reviews, swiftly followed by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but such was the word-of-mouth success of the series that when Bloomsbury released Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at 6am on a Saturday morning in July 2000, people queued overnight for a copy of the book. McCrum says:

Jhumpa Lahiri and Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian Americans. But this is really literature of globalisation and the immigrant experience -- at the opposite end of Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. Lahiri writes about highly qualified, professionally successful immigrants. But there is the aching loneliness of the outsider in a foreign land that will be familiar to immigrants everywhere in all stations of life.

What makes Lahiri all the more relevant and poignant is her ability to depict the gulf that separates the immigrants not only from their homelands but from their own flesh and blood -- parents from children, first generation from second generation. While the parents create their Little Indias, the children are more at home in the big US of A. And that creates tensions and communication gaps. The Sound of Silence could be the theme song of Unaccustomed Earth, where Ruma and her father in the title story, despite their love and affection for each other, have become virtual strangers, unable to share their inmost thoughts.

Lahiri uses a dual perspective, showing the thoughts of both Ruma and her father, revealing the distance between them and making the story all the more touching. Ruma wonders if her father ever loved her mother. That is another theme explored by Lahiri -- love, estrangement, infidelity are all explored in minute detail. Lahiri is always vivid and intimate: her characters come to life, burdened with all the flaws and expectations that make us human.

But she is too subtle a writer for me to portray adequately. Read the New York Review of Books instead, where Sarah Kerr reviews Unaccustomed Earth. The headline sums up the book perfectly: Displaced Passions. Time, while praising her, notes:

Among the things you will not find in Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction are: humour, suspense, cleverness, profound observations about life, vocabulary above the 10th-grade level, footnotes and typographical experiments. It is debatable whether her keyboard even has an exclamation point on it.

But that is what makes her writing so clean and natural and, combined with her gift for the telling detail, all the more sombre and poignant. Like these last two sentences in Going Ashore, the last story in Unaccustomed Earth:

It might have been your child but this was not the case. We had been careful, and you had left nothing behind.

As she says in an interview with the Atlantic:

I like it to be plain. It appeals to me more.

Also worth reading is her interview with Newsweek two years ago. Talking about how speaking to her parents every day and seeing them once a month has kept her thinking of herself as Indian, Lahiri -- who is married to a Guatemalan Greek American journalist -- said:

I can see a day coming when my American side, lacking the counterpoint India has until now maintained, begins to gain ascendancy and weight.

The Indian connection is fading.

None of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth is set in India. That's a big change from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake.

Naipaul and The Enigma of Arrival

Reviewing Patrick French's biography of Naipaul in the Times Literary Supplement, AN Wilson is absolutely right when he says:

• Naipaul is one of the best journalists;
• The Enigma of Arrival is a masterpiece.

The Enigma bored me when I first read it many years ago, but now I realise how good it is. Just don't approach it as a novel. It is slow, there is no plot development, no colourful characters.

But few writers have written so intimately about how they developed as writers.

Naipaul writes about his journey from the Caribbean to England, then selling off his house in England to go back to the New World to write about it, and finally returning to England. He writes about his insecurity when a publisher rejected the book, expecting an advance from which he had gone off to the Caribbean and North America. Running short of money, unable to concentrate on a book he had started writing in Canada, he decides to return to England as he has no audience in America.

Back in England, he finds himself a congenial environment and is able to write again. He describes the experience:

Everything about the house was welcoming and good... I felt protected, isolated, far from every wounding thing I had known. For the first time in many weeks I felt at ease.

That afternoon... I looked for the first time for weeks at the manuscript I had tried to get started in Victoria... I found it better than I had during the writing. I even saw the sentence where it had come alive -- a sentence written out of concentration, from within the mood created by the words. That critical creative moment had been missed by me in Victoria, perhaps because of my anxiety about what was to follow in the writing; and perhaps as well because of my anxiety about what was to follow Victoria.

Now, recognizing the validity of that good sentence, I surrendered to the pictures the words created, the other pictures they trailed...

Writing strengthened me; it quelled anxiety. And now writing restored me again. My book was given back to me. I began to write slowly, day by day...

Without the book, I do not know how I would have gone through that difficult time. With me, everything started from writing.Writing had brought me to England, had sent me away from England; had given me a vision of romance; had nearly broken me with disappointment. Now it was writing, the book, that gave savour, possibility, to each day, and took me on night after night.

I had intended to stay for a week or so in Gloucester. I stayed nearly three months, unwilling, apart from everything else, to cut myself off from the magic of the place.

Writing doesn't get more intimate than this. One can see the writer at work and his creative process. 

Written after his sister's death

The Enigma of Arrival is a must-read for anyone interested in writers and their work. It has been called a thinly veiled autobiography. But the last section, A Ceremony of Farewell, is undisguised autobiography. Here Naipaul writes about the death of his younger sister, Sati, in 1984. He writes about leaving his Wiltshire home and flying back to Trinidad for the religious ceremony officiated by a pundit who happens to be his cousin, the son of his father's brother. He writes about the Indian community in Trinidad and how they provided the material for his earliest stories. And then, on the last page, he reveals why he chose to add this account of his sister's death to The Enigma of Arrival. He had been thinking of writing such a book for years, he says, but he wrote it only after his sister's death. He explains:

It forced us to look on death. It forced me to face the death I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep; it fitted a real grief where melancholy had created a vacancy, as if to prepare me for the moment. It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory. And that was when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack (a character in The Enigma of Arrival) and his garden.

Poems and maps

I just added links to a few pages I created. Neither the Google Maps nor the poems are mine. I added the maps because Calcutta (Kolkata) is my hometown and Singapore where I am now. And the poems happen to be particular favourites of mine. Clicking on the horizontal tabs at the top of the page will lead to the maps and the poems. (And so will the links underlining those two words.)

Auden on Auden

He wanted to be a mining engineer or a geologist. Then just a month after his 15th birthday, he was walking home from school with a  friend one day in March 1922 when the friend asked him if he wrote poetry. "No," he said. "Why don't you?" asked the friend. And that was when he decided to be a poet.

Auden recalled this in an interview with Paris Review, which appeared in its Spring 1974 issue, several months after his death at the age of 66 in September 1973. Now the interview can be downloaded as a PDF file from the Paris Review website and it's fascinating reading.

The image is a page from one of his manuscripts reproduced in the PDF file.

Asked to name his "least favourite Auden poem", he mentioned September 1, 1939. He did not explain why, but that's mentioned in Wikipedia.

Artists and writers have no political influence, according to him. The history of Europe would have been the same had there been no Dante, no Shakespeare. A poet's duty is to "set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted".

Yet he says: "Poetry is not self-expression. Each of us has a unique perspective which we hope to communicate."

The world would be safer under women leaders, he says.

"I think foreign policy should be taken out of men's hands," he says. "Women have far better sense...With our leaders it is all too often a case of one little boy saying to another, 'My father can lick your father.'"

He could be talking of Hillary and Obama when he says:

"The difficulty for a man is to avoid being an aesthete -- to avoid saying things not because they are true, but because they are poetically effective. The difficulty for a woman is in getting sufficient distance from the emotions. No woman is an aesthete. No woman ever wrote nonsense. Men are playboys, women realists. If you tell a funny story, only a woman will ask, 'Did it really happen?' I think if men knew what women said to each other about them, the human race would die out."

USA still leads -- and will lead -- the world

Forget the nasayers -- America remains an inspiration to us all, writes Will Hutton in the Observer. He is absolutely right. He is so spot-on and so inspiring I have decided to save almost the whole article here.

The more I visit the US the more I think the pundits predicting the US's imminent economic and political decline hugely overstate their case. Rather, the next 50 years will be as dominated by the US as the last 50. The US will widen its technological and scientific dominance, sustain its military hegemony, launch a period of reindustrialisation and continue to define modernity both in culture and industry.

The fashionable view is that the American economy is a busted flush, a hollowed-out, deindustrialised shell housed in decaying infrastructure that delivers McJobs and has survived courtesy only of a ramped-up housing market and the willingness of foreigners to hold trillions of dollars of American debts.

China and India are set to overtake it in the foreseeable future. At best, the US will have to get used to living in a multipolar world it cannot dominate. At worst, it will have to accept, along with the West, that the new economic and political heart of the world is Asia.

The US economy is certainly in transition, made vastly more difficult by the spreading impact of the credit crunch. But the underlying story is much stronger. The country is developing the prototypical knowledge economy of the 21st century, an economy in which the division between manufacturing and services becomes less clear cut, in a world where the deployment of knowledge, brain power and problem-solving are the sources of wealth generation.

What counts is the strength of a country's universities, research base, commitment to information and communications technology and new technologies along with a network of institutions that supports new enterprise. Here, the US is so far ahead of the rest of the world it is painful.

The figures make your head spin. Of the world's top 100 universities, 37 are American. The country spends more proportionately on research and design, universities and software than any other, including Sweden and Japan. Of the world's top 50 companies ranked by R&D, 20 are American. Fifty-two of the world's top 100 brands are American. Half the world's new patents are registered by American companies.

This year, American exports have grown by 13 per cent, helped by the falling dollar, so that the US has reclaimed its position as the world's number one exporter. Moreover, and little remarked on, two-thirds of America's imports come from affiliates of American companies that determinedly keep most of the value added in the US. The US certainly has a trade deficit, but importantly it is largely with itself.

Singapore's Jeyaretnam: New York view

He is 82 years old, his Reform Party launched last month has only 10 members.

But Singapore's opposition politician JB Jeyaretnam was featured in the New York Times yesterday. One does not have to necessarily agree with him to admire his never-say-die spirit.

The New York Times presents a heroic portrait of JBJ, who was Singapore's first opposition politician elected to Parliament in 1981, 16 years after independence. It says:

Mr. Jeyaretnam’s flamboyance has clearly irritated (Singapore's Minister Mentor) Mr. Lee (Kuan Yew) over the years...

“Jeyaretnam,” he writes (in his autobiography) “is a poseur, always seeking publicity, good or bad.”

He does indeed love the limelight, but it is far more than a pose. Like with some dissidents in other nations, Mr. Jeyaretnam’s single-minded pursuit of a moral vision seems to be a compulsion.

The article begins:

It might seem late for a fresh start, but that is the story of J. B. Jeyaretnam’s life, a political intruder who refuses to stay away.

Last month he was back after six years of political banishment, the grand old man of political opposition ready to joust again with Singapore’s immovable political establishment.

“We are just beginning!” he exclaimed at a small news conference announcing the formation of a new party, the Reform Party.

It was an unusual phrase to hear from an 82-year-old man who has been running for office — when the courts would allow him — since 1971.

The Beatles in New York, 1965

And here are the Beatles singing Twist and Shout in New York in 1965. This is how they conquered America! This is historic!

The Beatles: Twist and Shout

And here are the Beatles singing Twist and Shout. Don't they look cute? Boy, they can really shout and "shake it, shake it, shake it, baby, now"! John sings himself hoarse but doesn't sound bad at all. Maybe he couldn't growl like Elvis, but he could rasp something wicked.