A few days ago, I happened to watch a video on YouTube.  It was in Istanbul 2010, a literary get-together of sorts.  V.S.  Naipaul was sitting in a chair on a raised platform alongside the host of the evening.  She was trying to draw him out to talk about his lifetime of work as a writer and what drove him to be so utterly consumed by the craft of writing.  I could detect an undertone of humor in Sir Vidia Naipaul’s responses.  Maybe it was my imagination, I’m not sure, but the passage of time and age (he would have been 77 at that time) had certainly mellowed him down.  The asperity of temperament was missing.

   I relate this because I had just finished reading his 600-page book ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’.  This was his third and final book on India during the course of his extensive travels across this vast land, meeting and listening to all kinds of people from every stratum of society between 1962 and 1988.  I don’t intend to do any kind of review for I am hardly up to the task.  The imagination would not support the effort.  Every time I read anything written by Naipaul, it impels me to examine and come face to face with my deepest emotions.  I think when the integrity of the writer shines through and the personality of the writer recedes humbly into the background, what you are left with is the most distilled aspect of the human condition.  Coming back to that interaction in Istanbul, the video which I referred to, I couldn’t help noticing a distinct lack of articulation.  Some obscure inability to give verbal direction to the life of the mind.  Sometimes it does happen in life that you cannot clearly express what you’ve been doing so diligently all your life.  There was a question about the shift from fiction from early years to the nonfiction in the latter part of his writings.

  Growing up on the small island of Trinidad in the Caribbean of the 30s and late 40s, the despairing feeling of having come to the end of the ‘material’, as he put it, there was this realization that he was not equipped to accurately and truthfully write about other societies whose soil he was not properly rooted in, the inner dynamics he could only feel superficially.  Then, what does he do?  He knows only one fact, that he’s not equipped to do anything but writing.  The passion is all consuming, the burden of ambition is pressing down upon him.  Leaving that small island and the people there with no sense of history or ambition was more than relief; it was also a kind of release.  More than 50 years of relentless travel, undertaking the searing examination of the making and unmaking of post-colonial society, the genius of Naipaul perhaps lies in his great success in overflying the limitations of his own social mornings and turning it into a moment of renewal and liberation.  You take the dark soil of tradition and transmute its energy into arguably the most vigorous and challenging voices of our time, or as he put it ever so simply, ‘’ making my way into the world’’.

   Vidia Naipaul is a master of clean cut prose.  He doesn’t use big words in his neat sentences, and yet he can express the most complicated of ideas, the most profound of human emotions in the simplest of ways.  If you have the ears for it, you can hear the authentic voice of the writer.  You can only know him through his words, there is no other way.  I feel a strong kinship with him.

 * Another week goes by and the optics keep getting worse and worse for Donald Trump.  More and more women are coming out of the woodwork.  As it turns out, Mr. Trump was quite a randy fellow back in the days.  I think the third and final debate between him and Clinton is just a formality.  The writing is on the wall, and I also think that he knows that there is a sense of inevitability about him losing this election in a landslide.

* In 1975 when the then prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of emergency in the country, she wanted a ''committed bureaucracy and judiciary'' and she duly got it.  And we all know how things have panned out since then.  In 2016 the present Union Government without overtly saying so, expects ''committed journalists'', whatever that means!  During the emergency, press was asked to bend, but it was (with few exceptions) willing to crawl.  In today's technological age of visual media, even though we don't have a national emergency, the news channels are perfectly happy to crawl and be more loyal than the King.

* Meanwhile, I've been watching season 4 of 'Masters of Sex'.  This season is even better than the previous ones.  In terms of tonality and aesthetics the show borrows quite a lot from ‘Mad Men’.

Like artists from any other countries, Pakistani artists are just that.  And like any professionals, they will go where there is opportunity and appreciation for their talent.  As it happens, India seems to be their number one choice for obvious reasons.  I am frankly disgusted by this jingoistic frenzy against allowing actors or anybody from the civil society from across the border from working in India.  These people are not the representative of their government or their army.  They are thinking people in their own right.  Any creative or business person coming to India from Pakistan in not the proxy for terror infrastructure in that country.  If you have to take on Pakistan at the military, diplomatic and political level, please do that in all your wisdom, but don’t be so petty minded as to go after soft targets like actors, musicians and writers.  As a country, we have to establish ourselves in direct opposition to everything that Pakistan stands for, by which I mean Indian people and the media, have to be more confident and less paranoid, more open and liberal and less intolerant.  Everyone from any country should be allowed to live and work lawfully in India, and that’s the only civilized and sensible way to go.

After receiving some sound pummeling from Hillary Clinton in the first debate, Donald Trump is smarting and hurting big time and no doubt he’ll come out swinging the next time.  I got a distinct feeling from his body language the last time that he was somehow trying to restrain himself from saying some real nasty things about Clinton, as he himself admitted afterwards, even though this was portrayed as a kind of magnanimous gesture on his part.  But now you may rest assured that he’s not going to be allowed himself to be bound by any nonsense of good conduct and gonna come out all guns blazing, he ain’t takin’ no prisoners that’s for sure.

My mind keeps going back to that old man and his ailing wife.  They have not just been defeated by life; they have been mauled by it.  Three of their sons cut down in the prime of their lives by the direct orders of the notorious criminal tuned politician Mohd. Shahabuddin.  Two of the brothers were doused in acid and the third one, though initially let go, was also subsequently gunned down because he refused to be cowed down, and as a sole witness to the gruesome killings of his brothers, was testifying against Shahabuddin in a court of law.  It is nearly impossible to wrap your head around the fact that this savage brutality took place because the family which owned two small time grocery stores was either unwilling or unable to meet the ever increasing extortionate and illegal demands of money by the henchmen of this vilest of Mafiosi. 

   I think anybody who is mature enough to understand the realities of the state in the last 15 years or so is familiar with the ways of Shahabuddin.  In my mind’s eye, I often imagine the town of Siwan, the personal fief and nerve center of his reign of terror.  Now, small towns like Siwan kind of hold a strange fascination for me.  Nothing much happens, a quiet desperation always bubbling underneath the surface.  There is no sense of renewal, only decay.  The place and circumstances are tailor-made for someone like Shahabuddin to emerge as some kind of an intermediary between the state and the people.  And because the modern functional state has been unraveling for a while now, gangsters like Shahabuddin worm their way into the mix and almost by default become the interface between the government and the people.

   A creeping metamorphosis takes place.  The man is courted and patronized by the political class for his considerable ability to deliver votes to the highest bidder in the electoral arena.  You see, we never fail to make such a big song and dance about our democracy.  This is only partly justified; because even though the hardware of our democracy--like regular elections, peaceful transfer of power and a thoroughly autonomous Election Commission—is working fine; but the software of our democracy—like mainly to repeal of inner party democracy, credible source of funding, the near epidemic nepotism and a feudal value system—is absolutely corrupted, and has grievously compromised its capacity to rein in the likes of Shahabuddin.  When you look at his photographs or videos, you can’t escape the feeling that this man actually quite revels in his criminality.  This unadulterated realization that you can’t just intimidate people, but you can crush them to the extent that they are reduced to nothing. 

   Sometimes, I am also mesmerized by the aura of remorseless evil around him, and then I am almost thankful for the kind of vision it provides me with as to how irredeemably diabolical people creep up on society and hollow it out, aided and abetted by the destructive cynicism of the political class.  

One last word on Burkini ban and I will rest my case.  Like my good friend Sweta commented on my previous post, I am second to none in my unstinting support for freedom of choice and women’s right to be who they want to be and live how they want to live.  But you know, every time a Muslim woman fights for her purely legitimate right to put on Burking or any other kind of veil in the name of cultural identity in a liberal Western society, it strikes a blow against thousands of woman who are struggling to discard full body Hijab in the oppressive Muslim world from Arabia to Africa.  Sometimes symbolism becomes more important than substance.  After all, why were so many women burning their bras on the streets of New York and other cities of United States in the 70s during the feminist movements?

In India the moment you achieve even some minor sporting success and PV Sindhu’s achievements are by no means minor, but I hope you catch the drift.  Now everybody in this country wants a piece of her.  Ever since she has come back from Rio Olympics, there have been endless rounds of felicitations, from politicians, to private organizations, to many charities and whatnot.  There have also been some ritual temples hoping thrown in for good measure.   People just want to milk her success for all its worth.  I mean it must create so much distraction.  I just hope all this adulation doesn’t go to her head and she loses focus.

I have no hesitation in admitting that I am a shameless celebrity watcher, not so much of the Indian variety but international one.   But there is one so called ‘’celebrity’’ that I positively loath has to be Miley Cyrus.  I just don’t fancy her at all.  I know and have also seen some of the numerous naked pictures she has posted online.  But seriously, who would be interested in seine Miley Cyrus naked!!  Even if somebody pays me to collect naked pictures of her, I’d thanks but no thanks.   

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the ban on Burkini enforced by the French authorities, I was wondering where do you stand of this.  Personally, I don't have too much problem with this.  I fully understand the logic and desirability of freedom of choice for not only women, but for every human being.  However, this piece of garment is an innovative idea to exercise a kind of trendy control over women's bodies.  Even if a lot of women have adopted this out of their own choice, my point is that they have done so because of the way they have been conditioned in Islamic societies, to regard their physical self as the repository of the family's honor and shame, and I have a major issue with that.  I think anything whether intended or otherwise is able to knock down the hidebound patriarchal edifice is not necessarily a bad thing is it?  People have dissed women in bikini for far too long.  This is a redressing of balance if you will, but for entirely different reasons.

The Prime Minister is very fond of talking about development all the time.  As if building more shopping malls, airports and highways not to mention smart cities and bullet trains is the be all and end all of development.  What about the human development and more importantly the intellectual development in the country? His ministers and other party leaders continue to express regressive, illiberal and often bordering on misogynistic views in public, which deeply embarrasses and demeans we the people in the eyes of the international community.  But what has the prime minister said or done about it?  His silence on this is more deafening and eloquent than many speeches that he has given so far.  In nearly two and a half years that he's been in office, he has never come out in support of a liberal ethos in society.  I'm not saying that he has actively encouraged the forces of reaction and unreason, but his silence, this almost an Olympian detachment from the cut and thrust of the whole thing doesn't help matters either.  And to think that because of his unquestionable authority both within the party and the government, one word or gesture from him and all the hot heads and extremist forces would have fallen in line.  What do people like us make of this studied silence, that increasingly looks like a tacit approval of all kinds of vigilante groups to bully and harass, and in some extreme cases, even kill those who do not share their narrow minded and bigoted version of this nation.  The idea of material economic advancement and upward social mobility on the one hand, and an egalitarian, open and secular society imbued with a sense of justice on the other, are not mutually exclusive.  Rather they are the different pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle that makes democracy a worthwhile human experience.  The prime minister must speak out and stand on the right side of history.  He should not be running with the hare and hunting with the hound.