Lecture Series at Demphe College of Arts

                                                     Demphe College of Arts 

                          A   Week's  Lecture Series on the novel  "Inheritance of loss" by Kiran Desai


                             Explored themes of Immigration, alienation and displacement 

                                       through a power point and readings & discussion  

Book Review - Sleeping On Jupiter

Sleeping On Jupiter by Anuradha Roy

 Sleeping on Jupiter by  Anuradha Roy

“Spotlight” garnered the best picture and best original screenplay award at the Oscars.  And rightly so, mainly for its content.  It portrays case stories followed by investigative journalist team of The Boston Globe, ‘Spotlight’, into the child sex-abuse by Roman Catholic priests.  In a similar vein, Anuradha Roy’s ‘Sleeping on Jupiter’ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015, and it won the DSC prize for literature this year. The author delineates a predatory account of the Spiritual Gurus in ashrams in temple towns of India. Sexual energy is forceful, demonic and all consuming.  It overrides other human qualities of virtue, aesthetics, compassion and empathy.

The story is told in first person by Nomi and by an omniscient narrator who between them, bring alive a whole set of characters and a temple town Jarmuli near the sea.  Nomita Frederiksen is an assistant documentary film maker who has decided to come to Jarmuli to unearth nightmarish dreams which prey on her at night.  She is in search of her mother who had abandoned her to the boat people near the open sea as a little girl and an ashram with its charismatic Guru who had visited horror and cruelty on her and her orphaned girlfriends in the name of security and love.

 Interwoven into the fictionalized fabric are the fleshed out portrayals of three conventional old women – Gauri, Latika and Vidya , who are on a holiday to Jarmuli and are grappling with their conservative lifestyles and cultural ethos. Pulled in both directions, they do entertain thoughts of freedom and escape from the shackles of traditional beliefs and customs. On the other hand, Badal, their temple guide struggles with his feelings of same-sex love with Raghu.  Teaming with Nomi, Suraj, the photographer, has his own demons to decipher and contend with.

Johnny Toppo, the tea stall man on the beach, is the Wise man in the story who has come to terms with good and evil in life and sings while at work. He refuses to be drawn into the darkness of past and memory, a space that Nomi at 25 years of age still desperately struggles with.  She wants concrete answers which the mysteries of life do not allow her.  Interspersed with her present endeavours at Jarmuli, she reconstructs the ashram of the past with dark colours and demonic characters perpetuating cruel deeds on innocent minds.

The author also juxtaposes violence and misogyny with the pursuit of sexual fulfilment.  Insatiate desires or denial lead the men to heap abuses and physical punishment on their women and children. A history rich in erotic paintings and sculptures in temples perpetuates child abuse and suppresses sexual drives of women.  A society which sanctions man and his desires stands in staunch denial when it comes to the question of women and their right to be as they are.

Anuradha paints stark and strong imagery in her writing. “Everyone said Guruji was God. Now she knew they were right. She stayed awake for most of the night with the fruit next to her pillow. She did not know when she fell asleep. In the morning, the fruit’s pulp was like blood on her sheets. Dark red.”  Visceral feelings surface with deft stokes of color.  “She patted the camel’s side and said,’Go! Run!Far! You’re free now!’ The camel didn’t move. It hung its head looking too weary to take another step. The girl pushed the camel, ‘Shoo, go ....before they come back. It’s your life.’  The camel stood its ground. It had never heard these words before, nor the tone of voice. Then it took one tentative step to the left, and then another. Above her, the sky is opal.”

The author also contrasts backgrounds of characters and their ultimate leanings.  Nomi, in spite of her traumatizing past and ghosts in her psyche, strives for sanity– unraveling and groping through her darkness.  Suraj, on the other hand, who comes from a middle class Indian family, the boy with a beautiful face “Suraj in the Sun” has a broken marriage behind me.  Dopey-eyed and degenerate, he meets his nemesis in the end – forever engulfed in the darkness of the waves and Nomi rides the waves to a better future in the north – Norway where her foster family lives.  Fate plays its own tune irrespective of earthly contexts.

Humor enters the book through the three women and their doings during their stay at Jarmuli. “ Every year that passed seemed to make Gouri more plump. Her limbs were spindly, but her torso was a mound, a pumpkin perched on matchsticks. It was a small miracle she didn’t topple. Then she noticed a man selling tea in clay cups. She could not remember when she had last had tea smelling of rain. She told herself she would get at least three cups right away, to make up ; she was certain she wanted to drink three cups.”

But the overriding factor that holds the reader is the searing lyrical prose through which the author successfully unmasks the hidden face of Indian spirituality, the treacherous hypocrisy of sexual abuse in India. Where women still fast for the lives of their husbands, but are exploited by men even before they reach puberty. Spiritualism and religion demands sacrifices from women, they are here to give pleasure, or the only other way they can survive is as Goddesses, the earthly incarnate being the ever sacrificing motherly women. The story also provides them another alternative – of an escape to the west to be able to live a more humanly normal life.

“And that is why we read fiction at all”  

Fiction to Films

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=6888&date=2016-03-06&pageid=1

                                                            Fiction to Films

One of the activities in my book-reading sessions is comparative study of the book and the film, if the piece of literature has been adapted into a movie.  A book once read cannot be disregarded altogether.  Even if it has triggered and evoked a strong contrarian reaction, it lingers on and is reflected upon, analysed, criticized and then maybe adapted into a film. Watching a film version of your favourite book is in a manner interesting – the process of visualization of that which existed in words and was imagined in multiple ways.  What the filmmaker left out or rather enhanced, how much did the story or visuals deviate or was followed ditto, using the same dialogue and vocabulary, as the book.

The Oscars 2016 still fresh in our minds had nine movie nominations which were adapted or inspired by books. Out of these, five were shortlisted as adapted screenplays viz. Carol, The Big Short Story, The Martian, Room and Brooklyn. The others include Steve Jobs inspired by the biography written by Walter Issacson, The Revenant by Michael Punke and the Danish Girl with Eddie Redmayne, based on the novel by David Ebershoff. The Embrace of the Serpent, a Columbian film shortlisted in the Foreign Language Film category( we watched it at IFFI) was based on handwritten diaries by two scientists –Theodore Koch Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes who spent 40 years working with tribals and Shamans, absorbed in their fieldwork along the river Amazon searching for a sacred  healing plant. 

Carol is based on a novel ‘The Price of Salt’ written by Patricia Highsmith in the 50s. The writer known for her psychological thrillers had more than two dozen film adaptations of her books. ‘Strangers on a Train’ written in 1950 enjoyed a mediocre success in the publishing world. It was only when the undisputed master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock adapted it into a film that it was noticed and became a success. ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ is another much known film based on one of her 22 novels in the Tom Ripley series.  It is interesting to note how the film showed sly Ripley (young Matt Damon) meeting his nemesis in the end whereas the book lets him go scot free.

The ‘Room’ written by Emma Donoghue was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010, and it won many other international awards, too. The story is relayed by a five year old boy Jack (Jacob Tremblay in the film,who appeared on the Oscars night at Dolby’s attired in a tuxedo)  held captive in a small room along with his mother. The experience is based somewhat on the hearing in 2008 of the Fritzi Case in a small town in Austria. Brie Larson, who played the part of the mother and the kidnapped victim, won the Oscar for the Best Actress this year.

Jack refers to the 100 sq ft area as The Room - another living being.  Emma capitalizes significant nouns used by the boy in the book (Rug, Bed, Wall) to emphasize his world made up of immense possibilities contrary to the restrictiveness and claustrophobia of the confined room and a traumatized mother. The triumph of the book is the voice of the five year old, an engaging pervasive sound that anchors the reader and artistically liberates the otherwise numbing story.

Colm Toibin, the Irish writer of the fame of ‘The Testament of Mary’, talks of his marvellous experience of seeing his book come alive on screen.  He says that he has watched the film six times and is very surprised and bemused by the transformation of this small idea he had in a delicate space in his mind; an idea which could have just been a novella but acquired a life of its own and went from being a book to a solid movie. The very morphing of the visuals on screen (He denies having played any part in the screenplay except a couple of appearances on the sets) took him on a different journey with his own book; an interesting intriguing feel to the whole phenomenon.

Books and films have existed together for more than a century now and have entered into a symbiotic relationship of ideas and forms. Creativity stems from books and filmwallahs are inspired to make frames of the storyline of a book and project it visually in motion pictures. It is like affirming and coalescing the imagination when reading the book and saying, “This is how it would appear in real life”.

Proponents of books swear by the writings of the authors and want to be left to their flights of imagination, rather than concretizing them to black and white details as shown in films. Others sit glued to visual screens, as it saves them time and effort of reading print. The sparring factions will continue on both sides, but Colm’s take on the book – film adaptation story- brings a fresh perspective to the entire process.

A film adaptation can be as pleasurable as reading or writing a book. The loud iteration of an avid reader – ‘A book is always better than its film’ or ‘Film spoils the book for its readers’ –becomes feeble and loses force when seen in this light.  Going by Colm’s ‘bemused’ utterances, the two genres entwine and enrich each other and can aspire to reach the same heights, making it a fabulous wholesome experience for the reader, who can enjoy it equally or more so in two different ways.

The jury rests here!

Teacher's Training Workshop

                                Teacher's Training Workshop 

            Developing Reading Skills in students 
                  at the secondary school level 

                  Nirmala Institute of Education Goa 

                                                            18th Jan, 2016

Ruskin Bond

Booked and How

“I have enjoyed a fairly long life, and in my time I must have read close to ten thousand books. Many were forgettable, and have been forgotten. I have also written a few- some forgettable! Now as I enter my eighties I still read when the light is good and my easy chair well cushioned “ Ruskin Bond

Come May and my attention veers towards the Indian Bond – Ruskin Bond ( He turned 81 on 19^th May, 2015) and his inimitable writing, a testament to his timeless appeal. His prolific writing has kept us engaged year after year (and film adaptations of his books like the utterly absorbing Blue Umbrella). A book cover in sea green strokes lauding a reader’s dream of a comfy chair in a quiet corner surrounded by a leafy plant or two, a pile of favourite reads, a furry canine curled up under the chair, and a title in muted red  -  ‘Love among the Bookshelves’ released last year. It became identifiable in its own right as it straddles the genres of memoir writing and anthology both in one book. An unsurprising feat indeed given the writer’s repertoire.

Right in the beginning, he puts all speculations at rest by disclosing that the book is not about any torrid clandestine love affair among the bookshelves but his lifelong romance with the printed word, a loneliness, depressive-driven engagement  with books and authors which fermented into sparkling wine of flowing words that continues unabated. “As a boy reading was my religion. It helped me to discover my soul. Later writing helped me to record its journey.” He hails the short story saying that when time and changing fads absorb and consume many fine writers of long fiction, short story gets picked up by anthologies and  may get selected again and again and thus have a long life keeping the author alive and vibrant long after he is gone.

A forest officer’s hoard of books in a rest house in the jungle, amidst a hunting party with guns, dense foliage and shadows of lurking animals became his first date with the treasure house, catapulting him on a long road of classics, ghost stories, crime fiction, comics and the short stories. Every chapter in two parts is a peek first into his anecdotal personal story of growing up in a boarding school in Shimla, Dehradun, and later  Channel Islands and London; followed by an interface with an author and an excerpt from one of his books. There are the usual suspects among his favourites - Dickens, Wodehouse and Maugham but also some others not so famous but precious like Bates and Jeffries.

Amongst Wodehouse’ great comic creations (Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, Lord Emsworth, Mr Milliner, the Drones club), Ukridge was one of Wodehouse’s most delightful creations in his earlier works (Wodehouse lived a long  life beginning with Queen Victoria’s reign, through Edward VII, George V, George VI and Queen Elizabeth II). A scamster with endless streams of making a fortune with despairing outcomes, he endeared himself to the growing-up Bond in school who turned to him through a disastrous climate of ‘quarrelling parents, disapproving relatives and censorious schoolmates.’ An excerpt from Love among the Chickens takes the reader through a never-never land of eternal sunshine, eccentric men and supercilious businessmen, to Wodehouse the master of comical refrain in impeccable English prose.

When in a lighter mood, he would browse through his favourite comic collection. Superheroes ruled the roost but his inclination towards British comic publications, like Beano, The Dandy and Champion assuage many a guilty reader’s heart directing him to plain fun for fun‘s sake (the breakthroughs like Maus, and Kari today completely subvert that feeling establishing the comic world as a rare must-visit genre of reading).

H.E. Bates’ short story collections which were then serialized in the The Strand magazine, never failed to amaze him. Bond’s long pursuit of short story (five hundred stories to Bates six hundred) can be attributed in part to his admiration of Bates art. His long story about Alexander and his love for the countryside in some way definitely sowed the seeds for Bond’s passion for nature. An excerpt from Great Uncle Crow authenticates the impression it must have had on a young mind of Bond’s disposition (Bond compares the tenderness and beauty of his writing to a Renoir painting).

“Today, teachers and parents and the world at large complain that the reading habit is dying out, that youngsters don’t read, that no one wants books. Well, all I can say is that they never did. If reading is a minority pastime today, it was even more so sixty years ago. And there was no television, then, no internet, no Facebook, no DVD players, none of the distractions we blame today for the decline in the reading habit.”  Reading the above passage in the book was a revelation to me and food for thought at our next Goa Writers meet.

The compelling writer with an austere, without frills, unsentimental style –  Somerset Maugham introduced Bond to adult fiction. His book Cakes and Ale, a thinly veiled portrait of Thomas Hardy and his effervescent wife Rosie, was a rage with the older boys in the dormitories of his school. He says that it appeals to him still with its freshness and zeal. But the writer to take away the trophy for the umpteenth times is Charles Dickens. “In a wonderful voice he could, by turn be Micawber, or Sam Weller, or Scrooge, or Marley’s ghost. What a face is his to meet in a drawing room! It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings.” Reading David Copperfield, he decided emphatically that he was going to be a writer. “And in a single-minded determined, Dickensian sort of way, I became one, for whom literature was religion.”  

An excerpt chosen by Bond from The Story of My Heart by Richard Jeffries in the end makes the book what it is - Love among the Bookshelves. A book that can help a human being discover his soul, its vastness and unity with all that exists and does not exist – the visible and invisible world. Where time and space is meaningless and stardust, the oceans, sky, earth and a blade of grass coalesce and flow together as one stream. And this well thumbed book copy now 50 years old, held together by Sellotape and adhesives still lives with him talking to him and being a friend forever and ever. 

 

Tagore's Legacy

                                                    Lasting Legacy

Centuries go by and handprints of certain souls remain etched in the hearts of generations to come. They are those whose legacy was inherited by people of a region, and then, when it could not be contained in a narrow realm, it overflowed and spread to landscapes beyond boundaries irrespective of geography and rotation of the earth.

Italian is one of the most beautiful languages in the world. It resonates and resounds with rhythms of the mesmerising Florentine vernacular, embellished and personally affected by the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. Europe in the olden times was a confusion of varied Latin dialects which gradually morphed into English, French, Spanish, Portuguese.....organically.  The dialect of the most powerful city became the language of the whole country. But Italy was a different story altogether. It remained fragmented for a long time divided between different power structures, and it was only in 1861 that it was unified. Hence myriad dialects (mutually incomprehensible between cities) thrived within the population and only as late as the sixteenth century, a few intellectuals got together to sort out the absurd language dilemma. A brilliant stroke of insight and they decided to hark back to the fourteenth century Florence, wherein Dante when composing the Divine Comedy had irrefutably derided the elite Latin (privilege of the educated aristocratic) to write his tale of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven  in the vernacular Florentine  tongue of the streets and luminous contemporaries like Boccaccio and Petrarch.

The legacy of the Italian language spoken today is not Roman, Venetian, or even purely Florentine. It is  Dantean.  Perfectly ordained and embellished by one of Western civilization’s greatest poets, an artistic pedigree par excellence. “The Divine Comedy is in triple rhyme – a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, imparting the Florentine vernacular a cascading rhythm which lives in the tumbling poetic cadences spoken by Italian cabdrivers, barbers, pedestrians, delivery boys and administrators even today,” says the writer Elizabeth Gilbert.  

Just as Dante’s legacy lives on in the very fabric of his land and globally, so does Rabindra Sangeet  sough through the green landscape of trees and reeds and rushes of Bengal, India and the rest of the world. Today as I write this piece, verses of Gitanjali and Rabindra Sangeet flow through valleys and hills of our undulating land and interweave the planetary revolution of the earth in the Milky Way to mark Rabindranath Tagore’s 154th anniversary. Calcutta, known for its bohemian tastes, artistry and music, culturally rests on a bedrock of the legacy of Shantiniketan  and Gurudev’s  music and poems sung and rejoiced by people in the streets, workhouses and shanties.

Readings of Tagore’s poems evoke flowers, mountains, the sky, sunrises and sunsets, boat rides and water and lead many to the verdict that he was a naturalist poet.  The latter per se would have the tenets of romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley. But Tagore’s mission was beyond the mere rapture of earthly beauty. He was a seeker who felt the divine touch and omnipotent presence through creation and nature. Living life embroiled in its vicissitudes, his quest for God is a spiritual awakening strengthened by a humble yet determined resolve to see Him in all his glory. His playing field was the study of the Vedas and Upanishads, and his poems reflect the essence of his reflections and ruminations of these sacred texts. In the symphony being orchestrated by the elements of nature in praise of the divine force, paradoxically he himself is so meager and small.

For him, God is not in the reclusive haunts of a self-proclaimed saint. Rather, he seeks God in the stream of life, the toil of a farmer, the soil of the tiller

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and  like him, come down on the dusty soil!

The procrastination that besets us and enmeshes us, chaining us to our comfort zones and force of habit or belief, such that renewal ever lies postponed :

The song that I came to sing, remains unsung to this day.

I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.

The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.

The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.

I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.

The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house.

I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

In many a verse, he enunciates the bindings of our big egos and illusionary fears :

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.

Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.

I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark?

I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not.

He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter.

He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company.

And over and over again, he pinpoints our human failings and illusions wrought by ‘maya’ :

`Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?'

`It was I,' said the prisoner, `who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.'

He also took upon himself the mammoth task of translating Kabir Vani,  titled Songs of Kabir :

Santan jât na pûcho nirguniyân

  It is needless to ask of a saint the caste to which he belongs;
  For the priest, the warrior. the tradesman, and all the
    thirty-six castes, alike are seeking for God.
  It is but folly to ask what the caste of a saint may be;
  The barber has sought God, the washerwoman, and the carpenter—
  Even Raidas was a seeker after God.
  The Rishi Swapacha was a tanner by caste.
  Hindus and Moslems alike have achieved that End, where remains no
    mark of distinction.

Footprints left on the sands of time to wring subtle but unparalleled changes in the history of mankind. 

Teres'a Man and other Stories from Goa

                           Regional to Universal: Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa                                                                            or

                                                       Local Flavour Triumphs

                                                                          or

                                                  Damodar Mauzo’s Hour of Triumph

                                                                       Or

                                                     Konkani Flavour goes Global

"When you want something the whole universe will conspire together to help you get it,” said Paulo Coelo. 

Damodar Mauzo joins the league of great writers like  RabindranathTagore (who was unknown outside his home till he was translated), Ananthamurthy, Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami ..........in making local flavour a universal song of humanness. His book of short stories Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa has been long listed for the prestigious international Frank O’Connor’s Short Story Award.  ‘Translation’ (a target of dialectics at literary festivals) has yet again served the purpose of taking regional writings (Konkani in this case) to a wide readership on a global platform.

Goa’s most-loved man of letters, true to his repute, has brought together a gamut of Konkani & English writers and readers under one platform - a feat in itself.  Great credit goes to Xavier Cota the translator, instrumental in this phenomenal story of triumph.

Teresa’s Man and other stories is a potpourri of realism, poetic myth, sadness, perception and gaiety.  Bhai’s art is kind but unsentimental, mocking but uncynical, profoundly Goan but distinctively individual.  An innate sense of irony coupled with a complete absence of pomposity and pretence is what makes Bhai a wonderful writer. He creates thoughtful fiction centred on serious moral concerns rooted in the Goan experience, but a universal human dimension makes it encompass the entire human condition (reminiscent of Malgudi Days by RK Narayan).

A dichotomy of human emotion underlies the pieces Happy Birthday and Coinstav’s Cattle.  The former is an ironical portrayal of a range of emotions between parents and children. A feeling of pure unconditional love is hence mixed with shame, lack, self consciousness and defeat; a dark and true element of human shallowness in relationships.

Bhai understands that the highest satisfaction may come from the reader’s growing recognition and understanding of the characters and their situations. The presentation of human beings or of human situations and the revelation of truth inherent in that human situation leads to a “gradual and slow illumination” of facts which is more satisfying than a manipulated perfectly worked out plot.  His stories in the book like The Cynic, She’s Dead, From the Mouth of Babes and  Sand Castles largely embody this aesthetics.

 So important is a  character to fiction that one may approach the story by asking “Whose story is this ?”  Bhai’s domain of fiction is the world of credible human beings, amazingly diverse and varied.  Bhai essentially tends to reveal his characters indirectly through thought, dialogue and action folded into the drama itself.  He very convincingly makes his characters speak “in character”

Bhai’s lifelikeness in his writings is credible and original. He uses symbols and imagery to add atmospheric verisimilitude to situations.

 “It is high noon. The sun, like a ruthless foe, is literally branding her body.  Below, the baked earth and above, the unrelenting orb of fire. The whole earth is engulfed in heat like a pie being baked in the oven.”

“The idol , the chovoth, the basket of sweets, firecrackers- all started fleeing away one by one!”

There are stories here in the book which may be termed as comedies of manner.  Bhai shows us what the characters are doing in such a way that we can understand why they are doing it. Out of the details of what they do and say, Bhai builds up the conflict and tensions. Shanker in Vighnaharta  finds an  escape in a ritual thus bringing the comedy of manners  to an  ironical denouement.

The literary constructions have brevity and tautness, which lend unity and power to the writing. Dattaram, a bullet bike driver, gives vent to his feelings of anger and frustration.  Three powerful lines at the end of the story encompass the whole experience dramatically - “Dattaram’s eyes were bulging, he was speechless. Getting back on the bike, he started it. Finally finding his voice, he spat out: ‘This is our language! This is our culture!’ ”

A short story is, after all, not a transcription of life but a dramatization of it.  In the familiar and the real, a skilful writer weaves vivid and dramatic threads to transform the banal, clichéd and formulaic reality into a potent story.  Teresa’s Man then becomes a meaningful read, a ride through the unknown, yet known realms of human lives.

Book  born from the heartbelt of Konkani culture rides the wave to star power. Kudos!