Some things I've been reading recently:

An interview with Jonathan Galassi, the publishing head of Farrar Straus Giroux and himself a poet and a translator of Italian poetry, on reading, writing, editing and publishing, and on the history of one of English-language publishing's most influential firms. Among the points on which I agree most emphatically with Galassi is when he talks of the pleasure that ensues when a manuscript is typeset: "I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it's even more satisfying when it becomes an actual book." And on the subject what he looks out for most in a novel: "I think the voice is the most important thing—and then the shape."

"After Making Love We Hear Footsteps", a very funny and tender poem by Galway Kinnell about a child ("Fergus") whom—and this is a wonderful phrase—"habit of memory propels to the ground of his making"

"The Last Writes", an essay by DJ Taylor about how there is neither the money or the space in British literary life any more to sustain a career as a full-time book reviewer. I always like pieces about the nuts and bolts of the trade (who pays what sums, how much time it took someone to spin something out, who earned what when), and read this piece with special interest not just because I occasionally write for the British press, but also because I've managed for a few years to make a modest living (actually a very fine living if we understand the word as "existence" and not as "income") from the very profession whose diminishing wages Taylor mourns. Hmm—I wonder how much time I have left on my clock.

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Check out this publisher’s post on the making of Divine Loophole, where Sanjay Patel name-checks Nina Paley, Ashok Banker and Amar Chitra Katha. He shows how a drawing evolves from reference to doodle to book art:

I actually discovered the book via Nina Paley’s blog… I ordered the first book by Mr. Banker which weighed in at over five hundred pgs. Keep in mind that was just book one of a seven part series. I just read and read and the thing slowly unlocked… Really meaningful stuff all wrapped up in a visually rich world of epic adventure. The story was just begging to be illustrated. [Chronicle]

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U.S. immigration allegedly advised a Mississippi shipyard on how to conduct surprise illegal deportations of their skilled Indian metalworkers:

As it rushed to repair offshore oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, [a Missouri shipyard] hired about 500 skilled metalworkers from India… Once the workers realized they would not receive green cards, many complained of fraud…

… the “direction” he received from an immigration enforcement agent was this: “Don’t give them any advance notice. Take them all out of the line on the way to work; get their personal belongings; get them in a van, and get their tickets, and get them to the airport, and send them back to India.” Signal managers said they tried to carry out those instructions on March 9, 2007, putting several Indian workers into vans to take them to the airport. They were prevented from leaving the shipyard by immigrant advocates gathered at the gates.

… another immigration official had assured him in a meeting that day that the agency would pursue any Indian workers who left their jobs, “if for no other reason than to send a message to the remaining workers that it is not in their best interests to try and ‘push’ the system” … Saket Soni, director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, which represents some workers in the lawsuit, said the managers’ testimony showed that immigration enforcement agents had “advised the corporation on how to retaliate against workers who were organizing”… [NYT]

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Expect a flurry of posts over this week. I'm going to be on a transcription spree now that I actually have a little time in hand. For now, it's back to the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Session: In conversation with Stephen Frears and Rahul Bose

I confess I had no idea what Stephen Frears looks like even though I've seen almost all his films. Consequently when a portly man wearing a snugly-fitting orange T-shirt, carrying a jhola that would make a Bengali poet puff his chest out in pride and slightly bulgy, bloodshot eyes walked in to the Baithak tent, I had no idea who he was. It's a tragic world when more people can recognise Rahul Bose, who was dressed in a skintight black polo neck sweater and a tighter pair of black pants, which might have been a DIY costume for a malaria mosquito sans wings. I don't know if the Stephen Frears conversation was a scheduled event but it certainly didn't seem like it. Bose said that he'd been roped in at the last minute and the Baithak tent was comparatively empty though that could be because Geoff Dyer, William Dalrymple and others were talking about travel writing in the adjacent tent. Anyway, so here come my notes from the session in which Stephen Frears squished Rahul Bose, leaving only the blood spatter of an actor's ego for posterity.

Points to be noted:

1. Stephen Frears, who is wonderfully self-deprecating and has a gloriously wry sense of humour, just couldn't look at Rahul Bose for more than 0.10 second at a time. It's a feeling I completely understand but I've reached this point after suffering the sight of Bose in a number of films and countless press-type encounters. The fact that Bose managed to evoke this reaction in Frears within minutes of meeting him is ... impressive.

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Abhishek Chaubey’s (or should that be Vishal Bhardwaj’s?) Ishqiya is set in the dark heart of a Gorakhpur populated by gun-runners, small-time and big-time hoodlums, double-crossers and avenging angels. The film’s leading men Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) are crooks too, but they are fleeing a sadistic boss (some things stay constant across cultures and settings), and in this landscape they are practically innocents abroad – a bit like R2D2 and C3PO fumbling their way through the desert in Star Wars. Then Krishna (Vidya Balan), a widow with an enigmatic past, invites them into her house, but the lighting and framing makes her look like a spider at the entrance of her web, and this is no reassurance that Babban and Khalu are any safer than they were on the road. Is Krishna pari or tawaif, or a combination of both, or something much more lethal?

At any rate, things are equally dangerous inside and outside. This is a place where crime, betrayal and violent recrimination are taken for granted. Thakurs and Pandeys are determinedly assembling their little armies and gun-stacks to resolve feuds that have been raging for generations; minions must dig their own graves if they fall out of favour; when a businessman calls his wife to say he needs money, her first, almost matter-of-fact response is, “Kidnap ho gaye kya?” Everyone is debauched, and ostentatiously religious too (a man with a fondness for S&M meets his whip-wielding mistress in a room with a large Radha-Krishna poster on the wall). From a salty little exchange between Babban and a street-smart young boy, we gather that children in the region are taught how to use rifles before they are toilet trained; later, a hilarious scene gives us visual confirmation of this.

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Aziz Ansari meets an Indophile, the kind of guy who’s always got some story about snorkeling in exotic lands, and retreats to his laptop to bone up on the desh. Towards the end of the episode, Amy Poehler lovingly calls him a little brown man-child compared to her date, a big white stallion. ‘Uncalled for,’ he snorts. (Parks and Recreation, S2xE14)

Quick notes on some books I've read recently: I’m doing full-length reviews of a couple of them but will only be able to post those once they’re out in print.

- H M Naqvi’s Home Boy is a very energetic debut novel about three Pakistani men in New York coming to terms with a changed, post-9/11 world – a world where “everybody is busy parceling myths and prejudice as analysis and reportage, and everyone has become an expert on different varieties of turbans”. I thought it was similar in some ways to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (which I wrote about here) but in form it reminded me equally of Gautam Malkani’s very ambitious Londonstani. The narrator, Shehzad (nicknamed Chuck), and his “metrostani” friends Ali Chaudhry (AC) and Jamshed Khan (Jimbo) exude “coolth” and speak a language that mixes gangsta-rap with Punjabi slang, but underlying their hipness is cultural unease, and Naqvi brings this out really well. Lots of droll humour too.

(Longer review coming soon)

- Tranquebar has a very good-looking “short fiction” series out – novellas between 100-150 pages in length – and Kalpish Ratna’s The Nalanda Chronicles is the perfect book for this format: richly comic, written with surgical precision and hardly an extraneous sentence. (As it happens Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, who jointly write under the “Kalpish Ratna” pseudonym, are surgeons. I can’t work out how they manage to be such prolific writers too.) There are many sharp character sketches here, including Mr Thomas the wisdom-dispenser; Maya and Arun, who “belong to a generation that is powerless to be anything but polite in public” and who must therefore content themselves with seething quietly rather than quarrelling openly; Farheen, whose long, white and solid legs set her apart from “the dowdy company of shins squamous or hispid, lurking within saris or salwars”; and Francis Figueredo, a spy who worries a great deal. These people and others are members of the Nalanda housing society and they travel to Nariman Point in a red-and-cream minibus, which, as the story move into fourth gear, is hijacked. Much chaos ensues.

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Session: Bin Laden After Bush, moderated by Basharat Peer.

There's something a little off about sitting in the sunny front lawns of Diggi Palace and talking about terrorism. This type of thing should happen somewhere gloomier, grimmer, clammier. But here I am, surrounded by pretty decorations and prettier people, turning into a kebab in the sun while furiously taking down quotes of Lawrence Wright, Max Rodenbeck and Steve Coll. Oh, and how cute is Steve Coll! Who'd have thunk that a man who looks like something out of a Pixar cartoon would be the man behind books like Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens. Also, how much more like the stereotypical war correspondent could Max Rodenbeck look — tall, lean, aquiline features, salt and pepper hair... Sigh.

Anyway, quotes ahoy.

Lawrence Wright on Al Qaeda and Palestine:

There are no Palestinians in Al Qaeda because it doesn't offer a solution to Palestine's problems but Osama Bin Laden mentions it in many of his speeches to give Al Qaeda credibility. So it's really a mercenary use of Palestine by Bin Laden.

Today, 75% of Gaza lives on $1 a day. Twenty years ago, it's poverty rates were not very different from America's. It's a society that has been flattened in 20 years and it's shocking to think more than a million people are imprisoned on that land.

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Ghee Happy’s deeply satisfying big brother, Ramayana: Divine Loophole, just went live on the Chronicle Books site. Or, if you can wait a couple of weeks, you can pre-order for $10 less on Amazon.

From what limited previews I’ve seen, the book’s art style is somewhat reminiscent of Sita Sings the Blues in that it’s bright, flat and retro. But its style is more jagged, less twee, despite Ghee Happy’s anime-style sloe eyes. Sanjay’s also got quite the eye for hipster fonts which get me hot under the collar.

The greater difference is in the artists’ approaches to copyright. Sanjay Patel’s day job is as a Pixar animator. Last fall he took me and Chiraag of PMH on a wonderful tour of the company’s storyboards, treehouse-style interiors and hidden speakeasies. The company is remarkably small, punches far above its weight, and has art students elbowing to get in. Like most people at large content shops, Sanjay holds traditional views on copyright. He slaves over his artwork and proofs in his little spare time, and it irritates him when someone ganks his drawings for a yoga studio or shoddy knick-knacks in Bandra.

In contrast, Nina Paley’s nightmarish experience getting copyright clearance for Annette Hanshaw recordings from the ’20s turned her into a full-blown free-culture warrior. What Nina did with ancient jazz could not have been anticipated by the singer when she was alive. Nina reused it in a novel way, mashing it up with an ancient epic to create something new. But rights clearing departments are designed to get large movie houses to cough up cash. They’re not set up for solo animators turning out works of genius in their bedrooms. And like pharma companies, rights holders like Disney have lobbied hard to get protection terms extended, destabilizing the original bargain, so their old characters don’t fall into the public domain.

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In the last half-century, what has united African-American civil rights campaigners in the American South in the 1960s, anti-apartheid demonstrators in South Africa in the eighties, anti-communist agitators in Czechoslovakia in 1989, discontented citizens and student groups at Tiananmen in China in the same year, and striking monks in Burma in 2007 and Tibet in 2008? The answer is civil resistance – a mass program of deliberate, purposive action committed to non-violence, and intended to alter the balance of political power so as to bring about what some commentators have called “a revolution without revolution”.

A hundred years ago, civil resistance as a political force was not much more than a minor curiosity. Although it had theoretical roots in the ideas of Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ruskin, in the realm of worldly application Mohandas Gandhi’s work for the rights of Indians in South Africa was about the only feather in its cap. Today, that is no longer so. The idea of civil resistance today has a history, a dignity, an allure, a vocabulary (agitations in the Philippines in the eighties gave rise to the term “people power”; the Czech writer Vaclav Havel produced a famous essay called “The Power of the Powerless”; the peaceful transfer of power in Prague in 1989 threw up the term "velvet revolution"). “Civil resistance” brings to mind strikes, fasts, boycotts, demonstrations, the use of potent symbols and messages, a sense of active community, solidarity, and discipline among discontented people. Civil resistance grasps that there are forces other than brute force (even as it accepts that violence and armed resistance may be justified in certain extreme situations). It is directed at the individual conscience of both the demonstrator and the adversary, and therefore runs deeper than matters of ideology. At the same time, it is nothing without mass support, and constructively channels the power of the crowd as a force for change.

Insofar as one of the reasons for studying history is to avoid repeating its mistakes, civil resistance offers a sharp, self-conscious break with many centuries of bloodshed and suffering over political, social and religious disputes. Thus, even when it fails, or is stamped out by violent reprisals, it is still on one plane a success, for having neutralised through responsible action the instinct to meet blow for blow. Yet, as recent history shows, civil resistance, while not evenly and universally effective, does not need any charitable definitions of success. As Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, the editors of this volume of case studies of modern civil resistance campaigns around the world, argue, the idea of civil resistance has helped redefine revolution since the 1960s. Although violence remains endemic in human affairs, civil resistance “has assisted at the birth of a new genre of revolution, one that involves force but not the violence always associated with that word.”

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I got my copy of Sanjay's new book back in December, I forgot to share it with you guys earlier. Here are a couple snapshots. The book should be available to everyone in a couple weeks or so.

Also, I've been working on the new Ghee Happy website, it'll go live next week! Keep checking back here, cause there's a new limited print dropping soon as well!

Are you guys ready?

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Having spent a few hours at my first Jaipur Literature Festival, I'm very sure of two things. One, having walked into a loo at the precise moment when Tina Brown was in it – hey, she shouldn't have kept the doors parted and unlatched – my chances of landing a gig with The Daily Beast are, shall we say, limited. Two, if there's a brown author from the subcontinent whose writing you like, you should make sure that there is no way on earth you ever hear them speak (unless it's me, naturally; but don't worry, my publisher will make sure no such occasion ever arises). Especially if they're in conversation with a smart non-brown person.

At the Jaipur Literature Festival, many of the luminaries were foreign writers and journalists. The ones I saw were all fabulous and matching their lovesomeness was the baffling ineptitude of the South Asian moderators, particularly the Indians. I know moderating is not easy but honestly, if the Indian moderators could relax and/or evince just a little more curiosity about the panelists, rather than being entirely focussed on showcasing how cool they themselves are, the sessions would have been so much better. And for heaven's sake, stop slouching in the chair. I'm not sure if it's got something to do with the balance of melanin in our skin but one lick of fame and Indian literary figures seem to become poncy, silly or boring. The actor Rahul Bose, being a man of special skills, managed to be all three while chatting with director Stephen Frears but fortunately we have not yet reached that stage at which Bose is considered literary. Omair Ahmad, whose A Storyteller's Tale I liked so much, proved to be one of those annoying people who loves the sound of his own voice and talks in incomprehensible sentences so that he can keep talking for as long as possible. Under the pretext of asking the charming Niall Ferguson a question, Ahmad would mummify his audience with his unending observations uttered in a weird almost-American accent. Ugh. I'm not sure this was better than having to see Basharat Peer moderate a session with Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright and Max Rodenbeck. Peer had about as much expression and insight as a piece of driftwood that has been fossilised for centuries and then dropped in a vat of chloroform. But I suppose he deserves brownie points for at least keeping his fumbling questions short. And almost 24 hours later, I still can't get over the fact that Shazia Omar, who wrote Like A Diamond In The Sky and incidentally had a close shave on 9/11, sounds like a Valley girl. While introducing Lawrence Wright, she described how she got away from the World Trade Centre before it collapsed and then said of 9/11, "It was, like, a life-changing moment for me. Really, it was a really big moment." No shit, Sherlock.

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[Okay, I know I already did this post about 3 Idiots, but here’s a somewhat related piece I wrote for Business Standard recently. Was moderately satisfied with it given the 1,000-word space and the very short deadline, but I do think the subject deserves to be discussed at much greater length, and with many more examples from contemporary Hindi cinema]

“So what IS 3 Idiots, really?” asks a friend, “Is it mainly a ‘fun film’ or an ‘issue film’?”

Now, of course there doesn’t have to be a cut-and-dried answer to this question. But the intriguing thing is that you might easily get two different replies from a single fan, depending on the context of the discussion. There are those who endorse the film because of its social consciousness (about the flawed educational system and the unfair expectations many parents have of their children) but who do a quick 180-degree turn when you try to move beyond a very basic level of engagement. Why is teacher’s pet Chatura repeatedly mocked (not just by the three leads but by the film itself) when he’s as much a victim of the System as anyone else? Why does the film set up a pat climax showing that the Aamir Khan character has become more successful than Chatura (who is pretty darn successful in his own right anyway), when the supposed “message” all along was that you should do what you love doing?

“It’s just a fun film,” say the fans when you raise these questions, “Don’t analyse it so much!”

None of this is to say that 3 Idiots is a deeply flawed movie. The reason we can have impassioned discussions about its shortcomings is because it gets many things right in the first place. But the way in which it goes somewhat awry post-intermission tells us something about the conflicting forces currently at work in mainstream Hindi cinema. It tells us about an industry that has to tread carefully while making “issue” films, because one eye must always be on the needs of the mass audience.

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If you are one of the few who subscribes to the RSS feed of Anonandon, you just got notified about a new post that has nothing in it. Apologies. It's just that having received the text message I'm going to share with you, I was all thumbs. It's a mass sms sent out by Suhas Awchat, the owner of the restaurant and kitsch nightmare Goa Portuguesa. If you eat there, you get serenaded by tone deaf men in sombreros and Hawaiian/wannabe-Goan shirts; a look at Awchat's guns (this is not a euphemism; he carries a gun around in order to add credibility to his claim of having served in the Indian army), and heartburn. The spacing and spelling of the sms have not been tampered with in order to respect the writer's grammatical integrity.

Mitr,i am appointed as a President of Human Rights Assos of Centre- Mumbai aprvd by Govt & UN.V can now fight against injustice,coruption etc.U can b member & will b entitled 4 Spl Name Plate 4 ur car,Powerful Letterhead & ID/Visiting Card which will enable u 2 help citizens.Pl SMS if intrstd.Tnx,Dr.$uhas

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's $uhas Awchat's letterhead and visiting card! He has the powerrrrrr! Stay in your cave, Batman. We've got the promise of a special license plate and powerful letterhead and visiting cards with which to vanquish evil. Cue in swelling orchestra that befits heroic exit.