Lutyen’s Delhi is a schizophrenic city, so drunk on its sense of power, it teeters on unstable heels (high, golden ones)

There. I’ve gone and spent it all on the title. I’m told this isn’t done, especially if I intend people to read the rest of my piece, but I’m going to impose upon the benign goodness of my readers and assume that since you’ve already ‘hit’ this page, you’ll finish what is going to be yet another rant (it seems to be all I do these days, but if you found yourself in the same situation as I’ve been in, and didn’t act prissy too, well, then you, my son, are a better man than I {I went with ‘son’, instead of the more gender-neutral ‘child’ because it’s just easier to then leave Kipling’s next line untouched, instead of adding the correct, but more clumsy qualification ‘man/woman than I’, even, say, if the latter were technically more accurate in this case}).

Back to Delhi, then, customary hemming-and-hawing done with. You can see it everywhere – in the scale, in the choice of automobiles, in the architecture – the almost manic geometry of the layout, in, inevitably therefore, the people. Their accents (a posher-part-of-London-meets-hardcore-Ludhiana-via-Chandigarh or a Gujarati-goes-to-New York-returns-to-Ahmedabad-and-then-heads-to-London type of thing – you know what I mean) and constructions (a marvellous study for any fledgling linguist/ gatekeeper-custodian-historian of language).

Shiv tells me that the same concerns are still being voiced by the same academicians, at the same kind of conferences, thirty-odd years down the line. Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me. Or, if I were to say it another way, this doesn’t surprise one. One what? One who? One why? ‘One’ has, in the past been guilty of using the third person two (sorry – I just couldn’t resist this numerical aside), but get over oneself, one wants to say to these other ones. Hmm.

(Aside: How is it that people discussing S&T Policy don’t know how to turn a cordless microphone on? It amuses me much that of all these scientists, this musician is the only one who is mic-savvy)
Ah well - these were the fevered musings of a conference I was at a couple of weeks ago. I 'found' it just today. Blame the 15-odd speakers I was meant to 'report' about for why I couldn't continue the rant which started (IMHO) so very promisingly. *Or thank them, if you'd rather, for they are the ones responsible for this - my shortest post yet.

The Unclear Conundrum

I wonder how this will help my cause any, but here goes anyway. I'm very annoyed with my paper at the moment. I was away for ten days covering the European Knowledge Commission debates across the country, and dutiful journalist that I am, was sending in pieces from all over in real-time. Now, the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom (I'm just oozing generosity of spirit this evening), did not carry the articles when they were sent in, because the head honcho was away. They are now dated, but the paper still says it "wants to run them". Today, my desk-head called and said they wanted to carry an edit piece on the proceedings, without first grounding it in the news it seeks to comment on. The guy they approached to write this editorial is one of the most brilliant men I've met yet (and no, it isn't because he's luminous - backlit by some halogens or anything), and the reason I was taken along to cover these conferences in the first place. Genius that he is, he said we'd send in something in 5 minutes. 

No prizes for guessing what happens next - we tweak one of my articles, and turn it into an edit in 30 seconds flat.

It irks me that we had to, but c'est la vie and all that shaata (Thank you, Jj - I can't imagine life without this handy little cus word now). 

The piece I turned in was about one of the best public debates I've ever attended. It was on the Nuclear Energy issue (Yes, I know - you thought books, music, places and movies were all I wrote about, and I would have had to agree, prior to January 10, but...there we are. The blog IS called 'She Writes' - in my defence, I never once specified what about!). 

Without further ado, since there's always so bloody much of it wherever I'm concerned, ladies and gentlemen, I give you 'The Unclear Conundrum'

Return of nuclear power: Old problems, changed contexts

The nuclear story as it is told in India is distinctly incomplete. While the debate around it is age-old, this story has always suffered from our society's inability to give voice to those pathways of innovation the choice of nuclear energy rendered non-options, pushing them ever closer to obsolescence. A new kind of imagination is called for if we are to tell this tale allowing for the plurality inherent to storytelling.

What brings about this musing is a continuation of the ‘Knowledge Society’ debates which recently took place in the country. The STEPS Centre University of Sussex, and civil society groups in Bangalore, organised a public discussion on the nuclear energy debate, exploring how its current resurgence, while posited with the same problems of yesteryears, today requires a new terms of engagement, since the context in which it is playing itself out is a charged one.

While concerns relating to nuclear weapons have dominated debates in India for the past few decades, the talk of nuclear power expansion has traditionally been justified by saying that it is the only way India can meet its growing energy needs. Likewise, in Europe, many governments and policy makers are encouraging the propagation of this form of energy as a response to climate change and environmental concerns. But even as these contexts play out within the ambit of local politics, the old problems with nuclear energy – those of high costs, safety concerns, radioactive waste and security risks – have not been addressed to-date.

The Princeton scientist MV Ramanna has made an astute case for what he calls ‘the propaganda of scarcity’, saying that agendas so shrill and heightened that they are close to proclaiming we’ll have no electricity if we don’t ‘go nuclear’ are pure rhetoric. Starting with Amulya Reddy in the late 1980s, there has been a lobby firmly stating that alternatives to the nuclear path exist – it’s time we took them seriously.

SPRU Policy Scientist Andy Stirling holds that it is imperative we know why we’re sceptical of nuclear energy – so-called ‘facts’ can be made to read in different ways. Right at the outset we need to recognise that there is literature which says that this form of energy is safe, cheap and reliable. The question then, is that of parameters and supposedly apriori assumptions, such as the most common one of them all: that nuclear power is cheap.

The other argument made for it is its alleged environment friendliness – how can this go unchallenged? And as for the risk of energy dependence, we would do well to question whether this isn’t simply a case of moving from one form of dependence (gas) to another (thorium/uranium). This is not merely a technical debate. The facets underlying it are very political, and we would do well to engage with it at top priority.

Scientist Vishnu Kamath maintains that it would be incorrect to view this question in the light of an ‘either/or’ parameter. It shouldn’t be about pitching one form of energy against another – it would be reductionist to say ‘if not nuclear energy, we should try thermal or hydal power’. What is called for is an examination of the developmental paradigm our country subscribes to – any developmental work undertaken needs necessarily to cater to the multitudes of have-nots, and in a direct manner. Again, if this sort of democratic, all-inclusive form is what we’re looking for, nuclear energy isn’t the answer.

We cannot fall prey to the amnesia that seems to underwrite any discussion of the nuclear question in India. I come to this question from the vantage point not of science, but of the social sciences, and I ask myself, what does ‘being nuclear’ mean to our Indian middle-class imagination? Science was to be the language of the Indian Nation-State, with different forms of energy reading as metaphors for it. We overlooked bio-mass, and with this crucial exclusion, failed to speak of the scores of people living with and in nature. 

There followed a systematic disengagement from indigenous knowledges, even as liberalisation broke down our body politic. Our defeated ‘traditional’ knowledges therefore remained dialects, never allowed to turn into full-fledged languages. To dissent against the nuclear was to call into question all of officialdom, and in so doing, the sovereignty of the nation; yet another instance of the suspension of democracy being officialised.

Gypsy Caravan - When the road bends...

"You cannot walk straight
When the road bends..."
- A Romany-Gypsy proverb

This piece could very easily turn into one of a number of things. I recently discovered that, while the people it refers to are ancient, the term 'gypsy' itself is of relatively recent (late 18th-early 19th century) coinage, and is derived from the dark, laden term 'Egypt' (which, by the bye, is NOT what that Egyptians call it). While this is undoubtedly fascinating in and of itself, it isn't what I want to write about right (ARGH! That ghost of internal rhyme still hath me in thrall!) now.

I could also, perhaps, trundle off into stories about how I've always seen myself as something of a gypsy - how the wanderlust in me, I've always wishfully ascribed to some wild-eyed, dark-haired, wandering minstrel of an ancestor. On second thoughts, that description fits me more accurately than any ancestor of mine - perhaps I should leave them poor souls out of this. Hmm.

Anywhoo, I'm focusing for a minute to tell you what I DO want to write about - this afternoon I saw what is possibly one of the finest music documentaries ever made - and this isn't one of those "Ten thousand saw I at a glance" type of hyperboles either. Jasmine Dellal's 'Gypsy Caravan' is, in a word, splendid, and should be compulsory viewing for any musician or music aficionado. While I'm being didactic and prescriptive, another thing that is "compulsory" for this breed of weirdos, of which I am a loud and proud part, is the reading of Pratchett's 'Soul Music' - just take my word on this one; don't argue - read!

Meandering done with, back to this Caravan, then. What I love about this documentary is that it doesn't dwell on how misunderstood this race has always been - something it could justifiably and easily have done. Instead, it celebrates them in all their glory. And since nothing to do with the gypsy 'way of life' would be complete without their music, so much the better for this avid viewer/listenHer (another of Jayawant's 'jjems'). The World Music Institute arranged for a group of gypsy musicians from Macedonia, Romania, Spain and India (don't look askance at this inclusion - Gypsies originated from the tribe of 'Roms' who migrated westwards from North India in ages bygone), to tour across America, Canada and a host of other countries, a few years ago. Alongside them on this 6-week journey was this intrepid filmmaker, Dellal.

To me, this documentary is an ode to the beauty of exchanged acquiring. The musicians from these countries start out wary of each other, but end on a carnivalesque (can it be otherwise, with this particular group of performers?) and suitably 'emancipated' note, which sees a Rajasthani folk singer plaintively croon, 'is duniya mein kitna hai gam', to the strains of a classical Spanish guitar and a flamenco dancer giving form to his grief. 

Esma, the Macedonian diva, in one of her early interviews stresses on how she is against "assimilation", and has stuck to the purity of her form. This same chanteuse - one of the best I've ever heard - ends the documentary singing with a troupe of Romanian gypsies, 'Taraf de Haidouks' (which literally translates to 'Band of Brigands': this troupe 'runs' their village on their earnings). Nikolai Neascu, the lead violinist, is one of the most expressive musicians I've heard yet, and his protege, Caliu, one of the fastest. Nikolai dies before the end of the tour, and the music his Brigands play at the wake is as extraordinarily moving as only music, when every other form of expression (beginning with language, first off) fails one, can be.

I've got more to say about the documentary itself, but I won't. As you walk away (I had the fortune of attending a special screening for just 5 people), what stays with you is how easy music makes the task of communicating - there are 30-odd musicians here, most of whom do not share a language in common, at least ostensibly. This is until the first note is struck - the first 'stance' taken. Then, everything falls into place. Juana, with her pack-of-cigars-and-crate-of-whisky-a-day-for-fifty-five-years voice, sings her 'lament'. As does Esma. That I don't know what it is they sing about, and probably never will, suddenly ceases to matter. I share their grief, as I know you will too.  

Wadings, waitings, weddings - whatever

Four-point alliteration done with, I'm going to talk today (goddamn this ghost! Yikes!) of a phenomenon I like to call the 'It's not my wedding, so I don't have to attend all the functions in it Blues'.
Now, I'm not 'for' weddings, but I believe, equally, that if I've taken the trouble to go attend one (and not just anyone's either - the one I'm talking about saw two very dear friends tie the 'Knuptial Knot' {that's one of Jayawant's - I can't take credit for it} as it were), then I owe it to them to at least, well, stick around long enough to see them "do" the phera thing and be pronounced man and woman (Erm, I don't like the sound of 'man and wife' - you mean he gets to stay whatever it was he started out as, but she changed from being her own person to being a 'wife'? What is that? A fourth gender?).
Anywhoo, so a bunch of us were at this wedding and we had a blast. So where's my grouse? Only in that just a handful of us stayed put for the actual puja and pheras, which happened, admittedly, really late into the night. We also 'accompanied' (kicking and screaming) the newly-weds to their hotel room, where we proceeded to annoy the living daylights out of them till the wee hours of the following morning. This, I like to think, they will remember. As will we.
I guess what this rant is about is something I've heard called 'group dynamics'. It's perfectly possible for people you know in their individual capacity to be very intelligent and fun, to metamorphose in the blink of an eye into mindless airheads, all about finding that next drink/party, whatever; to turn into, in other words, a gaggle of geese. Don't for a moment think I'm excluding myself from this gaggle - I squawked (or whatever it is that geese do) as loudly as the next person - but I did realise that this is not good news.
It leads me to draw one of two possible conclusions. Either I need to lighten the f*** up and not have such a chip on my shoulder about mindlessness, or, and this is the harder of the two to accept, I need to realise that people, as they grow older, tend to drift apart - we have less in common than we did in middle school, when our needle-work teacher Ludvina (bless her soul) whacked us all on the knuckles and we hated her equally, for example.
It would seem that this piece has taken on something of a life of its own - I didn't mean it to go quite this way, but as it is, it reads like a eulogy for the leopard which changed its shorts (Go read Pratchett, I say!). Hmm.

'Harmony in Germany':Politically correct racism

In this day and age, when borders seem to be forever shrinking in the face of the new language everyone in the world seems to want to learn – capitalism – it is harder to be overtly racist than it used to be.

It isn’t as if racism was de rigueur in times bygone, but no one would have looked askance a decade ago at, say, a bus driver in a sleepy English town not taking the bus fare from the hands of an Indian girl, or a Frenchwoman doing likewise when aforesaid woman tries to buy a book on Van Gogh at the Louvre (in the year 2000). Just for example.

Now, however, what with ‘political correctness’ taking centre-stage in our scheme of things (and how can it not, when migrants form such a large percentage of any place’s population?), one complaint to the right people and the bus driver and shop assistant would be out of a job.

Does this mean, then, that racism has vanished altogether? That we’ve managed to beat down this ugly monster and relegate it to the realms of nothingness? Far from it. All that we’ve managed to achieve, with this superficial propagation of that which is PC, is to force racism into a new shape; make it necessary for it to assume a new form.

Cut to 2008. Frankfurt airport. I’m flying Lufthansa, and arrive at the counter, ready to check in. The woman at the counter asks me to weigh my cabin baggage too, for some reason. Having stowed my laptop in there, it was a little above the stipulated 8 kilos. I told her as much. She turned her sweetest smile upon me and said, “Well, feel free to throw it away then.” I thought she hadn’t heard me, and repeated that it was overweight because I had my laptop, which I was allowed to carry as a separate piece anyway, in there. She smiled and said, “You heard me – I said ‘feel free to throw it away’. You could do that, for example.”

For example. This is when it dawned on me that I’d stumbled across someone who was very au courant – a la mode, culturally, to the tee, what was being used upon this unsuspecting country cousin was the ‘latest’ form of racism – metamorphosed into this sickly sweet politeness, chilling by virtue of how it uses the smile – that ultimate leveller which speaks to something in us all, regardless of what language we speak or where we’re from – and disconnects it from what we associate it with most; the ability to empathise or ‘connect’ with another human being.

I stepped out of the queue, and attempted to “throw away” whatever I possibly could – the casualties were the posters, newspapers, calendars and other literature I’d picked up at the music festival I’d gone to Germany to cover. It was that, or the laptop. This done, she made me queue up again. I didn’t mind. I watched her fawn over the people ahead of me (with bigger, heavier bags too, mind you), and help them out as best she could. When it came to my turn again, that smile didn’t wither, but the light in her eyes that accompanied it did. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Paying the (exorbitant) ‘excess baggage’ sum she said I owed the airline, I did.

'Harmony in Germany': Cologne and the Cathedral

I left Berlin reluctantly. In spite of the prospect of meeting/ hearing some mouth-wateringly brilliant bands and musicians in Cologne, at the music festival I had ostensibly gone to Germany for, I kept thinking there was much more to Berlin than I’d been able to get my head around in the week that I was there. The place truly had me in thrall, and I was a minion to its dictates.

Such being my état d’être, I got on board the train to Cologne wishing I didn’t have to leave just yet. The three hours this cross-country journey took, complete with stunning panoramas and rollicking glades on display, made me make some sort of peace with my situation.

Pacified some, I trudged out of Cologne station, and the sight that met my eyes (in a very clichéd fashion) made my jaw, bags, and reservations drop. And how. There in front of me was Cologne’s pride and joy, the most visited heritage site in Germany; Cologne’s central Cathedral.

If Berlin's ‘human-sized’ scale had placated me into a false sense of security apropos my own importance in the universe’s scheme of things, Cologne Cathedral decidedly put me in my place. To call this awe-inspiring, humongous building an architectural marvel wouldn’t even be scratching at its surface. Cologne Cathedral merely ‘is’.

The cathedral was a ‘gift’ to the city from a grateful medieval Pope, helped out in his time of need by the city’s army. During World War II, the city knew the cathedral would come under attack, and cleverly dismantled its gorgeous stained-glass mosaics, storing them in the cellars till such time as it was safe to have them out on display again. Wise thinking, as the events which transpired were to prove.

This ‘Northern-most tip of Italy’, as Cologne likes to think of itself (it was founded by the Romans), is a place where history lives. It breathes in every citizen (proud, and rightfully so) of this beautiful, ever-so-European haven. Divided into two by the Rhine which meanders through the heart of it, Cologne, as any of her people will tell you, has always been a ‘very important’ city – first on the pilgrim trail, and then as a trade capital.

Today, the city is just as important on another pilgrim trail – that of the new-age-electronica-lover – and is home to some of the most cutting-edge electronic musicians in Germany.

And did I mention the traditional rivalry between the Cologners and Berliners? The mere mention of Berlin is enough to make them look at you circumspectly – could you actually, perish the thought, for a second, be suggesting that Cologne is not the centre of all that is finest in art, culture, music and well, living? Berlin, they feel, is jaded. Cologne, feel the Berliners, is so caught up in where it’s from, that it can’t see where it’s going.

Instead of attempting to solve this age-old debate, I’ll take the easy way out. I’ll take both, please.

'Harmony in Germany': Nameless Now in Berlin

One doesn’t ‘adopt’ Berlin; the city adopts you. If you’re lucky. It’s just one of those things.

The city did just that for a group of wandering musician-gypsy-festival organisers from India recently. In Germany as a panel of ‘music experts’ from the region, the group was in Berlin and then Cologne in August as part of an initiative undertaken by the Goethe Institute in conjunction with the well-known electronic music festival/professional music fair, C/O Pop.

As is wont to happen when a group of dynamic individuals all working towards the same end, albeit in different, if complementary fields, comes together, this group wasn’t content to sit back and merely watch proceedings unfold, talking to festival organisers from across Europe and c. to see what could materialise by way of collaborative enterprise between European (German, more pertinently) and South Asian musicians/event organisers/record labels. They wanted to perform. And perform they did.

Archana Prasad, an artist from Bangalore who ‘plays’ with ‘Lounge Piranha’ in the capacity of a visual artist (or ‘VJ’) had something to do with this. An independent local art gallery, ‘PutiKlub’ in the uber-trendy Western area of Kreuzsberg had exhibited Prasad’s work when she was in Germany earlier this year. She contacted them again, saying she was back as part of a group of musicians and artists who wanted to organise an audio-visual installation/presentation while they were in Berlin. Manolo, the owner of the gallery, jumped at the idea.

Thus was born ‘Nameless Now’, which saw electronic musicians Samrat Bharadwaj, Varun Desai and Prashant Pallemoni from India, RnB singer Randhir Witana from Sri Lanka and mandolin player Faisal Gill from Pakistan come together to lay down and create a musical score onto which Prasad, projecting onto a wall of the gallery converted into a gigantic screen, ‘played’ with images “suggested by the music these guys created”.

Jamming with each other – letting the one and then the other take centre-stage – the act’s main protagonists did their thing, wowing the assembled Berliners (and a motley crew they were as well – Turks, Mexicans, Middle-Easterners and Spaniards, among others, rubbed shoulders with the more indigenous members of the audience), as only they knew how.

This example, so typical of the city, serves to highlight the openness of Berlin’s attitude; its assimilative state of mind – everything that constitutes the city’s cultural consciousness, which consists of so many, many parts, each one generously embraced.

Berlin is living proof of the veracity of Calvino’s claim: Here is a city that constantly reinvents, rewrites, and in so doing, reiterates itself. This it does by dint of its unique ability to not simply make room for the ‘other’ to its norm, but by suspending with the very idea of a norm, thus abolishing in the same fell swoop the need for a creation of the ‘other’.