The Aquamarine cover of the book that came all the way from America gives a surge of joy, which is paradoxical considering that this EVERYMAN by Philip Roth is anything but a joyous read. It involves meditation on his life by an old man from his childhood to his youth, and now he is an old frail man buffeted by the vagaries of time and circumstances and is at death’s doorsteps and there is this wait for the inevitable.

One reason almost all the works of Philip Roth resonates with me is that his novels are peopled by mostly unhappy characters and there is no such thing as happily ever after. Now, I may not have any other talent but I sure as hell have talent for unhappiness.

What do you do? You keep your head down and do the best you can. You plod though even though you are being frog marched to the edge of abyss. Something turns inside of you and you think ‘’what do I care ‘’ ‘’ let them all go to hell’’. These phonies are sowing the seeds of idealism, but soon enough, they will reap the bitter harvest. Those stentorian voices telling you ‘’ you need structure’’ ‘’ you got to have a strategy’’ ‘’ time management is of paramount importance’’. You turn around and just say ‘’ I have given up the ghost’’  

Philip Roth

We all have twenty six alphabet in the English language and we all have decent enough vocabulary, well, some more than others but the point being that we can construct enough sentences to get by and navigate this labyrinth called life. But what happens when these same tools in the form of words acquire a life of their own when used by some people. These people whose business it is to construct sentence after sentence, their words and lines become a force of nature. At times, they give clarity and at times they project a telescopic view to explain human condition.

Philip Roth has been at the vanguard of this special tribe. What can I say about this great octogenarian American writer that has not been said before? He has written 31 books and numerous articles over a career spanning more than five decades. After his last book THE NEMESIS was published in 2010, he said in an interview to Le Monde that he would be writing no more. What I found most astonishing in that statement and the interview was the sheer humility of it all. Make no mistake, Philip Roth is a royalty in American letters and as we know writers and creative people usually have Himalayan egos (Salman Rushdie is a prime example). But Philip Roth said that with THE NEMESIS, he’s reached the end of the road and he has given his all to his writing and he has no more to give. And boy! Has he given or what. From his first work, a collection of short stories GOODBYE, COLUMBUS to THE NEMESIS, he as covered a big arc of variable themes of American identity and the eventual betrayal of American ideals. His semi-autobiographical tone, his constant meditation about old age and death and his provocative exploration of Jewish identity are absolutely fascinating. The small towns of New Jersey are not just an impersonal props but a lived reality in his works. He married twice but it didn’t work out. His first wife died in a car crash in 1968 five years after they separated. He doesn’t have children and to the best of my knowledge, he lives alone in his apartment somewhere in Manhattan.

I can confidently speak for everybody when I say that we don’t love America because of its muscular foreign policy, but because men like Philip Roth live there.  

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Amitava Kunar is someone who has spent a major part of his life in United States now, but Patna never left him although he left the town where he grew up. Coming from someone who earned two master’s degree over there and now teaches at one of the famous liberal arts college in upstate New York, A MATTER OF RATS, A short biography of Patna is a delightful meditation on life in this city without being judgemental or falling prey to cliché. Living here, I found the book fascinating and can definitely relate to it at a subliminal level. There is this old chestnut of how it was the seat of the powerful Mauryan Empire in the ancient India. But this history is older than old, in fact so old that it has acquired a mythical quality which makes you wonder if the time really existed. When you think of it, it is no doubt one of the shabbiest capital city anywhere, so much so that Shiva Naipaul, the writer and brother of the formidable VS Naipaul, who came to the city in the sixties, was so appalled by the dehumanizing poverty that he said that this place defies reason and alienates compassion. There is also another account by another scholar who maintains that Patna can be found everywhere in the world and compared the sheer vividness of the human scale to the ancient Roman Empire. More than anything, as Amitava Kumar rightly mentions, Patna brings you face to face with your own immortality, this looping circle of regeneration and decay and how every life is a failure in the ultimate analysis.

PS  I didn’t know that the great Marlon Brando once visited back in 1965 and spent a night here. He was working with the American charity CARE at the time of severe famine in this part of the country. 

Of late I’ve listening to a lot of film music and also English music from the 80’s, and it got me thinking about that particular period. But before I go any further let me just say that hindi film music from the 80’s was not a very glorious period in terms of melody but every now and then you discovered some priceless gems and also those seductive disco numbers were really peppy, foot thumping kind. But more than anything else, the music took me down the memory lane of my formative years spent in that nondescript small town called Nawada. I am truly a child of the eighties, and when I think about it, a kaleidoscope of vivid recollections floats across my mind. It was a time of command and control economy and it was so bloody difficult get hold of some of the goodies that we take for granted today like cookies, soft drink and butter. There was scarcity all around and the problem was more acute in smaller towns. What surprises me after all these years is how happy I was. I did not know many things but ignorance was bliss; somebody asked me at that time, what is the capital of America is (yes it was simply America for everybody then no US or States) and when I said I have no idea, he solemnly pronounced New York and I quietly swallowed it, he might as well have said Moscow for all I cared. And my English was as good then as my French is now which is to say not good at all. The point being that I was so immersed in a world of my own, a world where I was umpiring on a wheelchair in neighbourhood cricket matches and also trying to collect twenty Rupees for the replacement ball ! Pocket money was unheard of, at least in our case. Those hot afternoons of interminable power cuts and whiling away the time playing Doctor Patient where I would always play doctor and my younger sisters would be forced to play poor patients. But soon they will have their turn at getting back at me for when they played neighbouring housewives, I would be the doorman at one of the houses.

It was the era of renting VCR and whole night of movie marathon depending of course on availability of electricity because we had to get our money’s worth. I also associate that time with first LP record and then cassette players and enjoying Kishore Kumar who had acquired a real grainy voice by then that was, if anything even more enriching and at one fine evening hearing the news of his demise on the All India Radio. The memories are too numerous to enumerate but judging from the vantage point of today, I notice a curious symmetry. Nowadays I am depressed most of the time, back then I was happy all the time. Now I spend all my time indoors, then I’d be outdoors mostly. Now in the virtual world I have many friends but none in the real world, then I had friends in the real world and there was no virtual world. Now I know many things about the world, back then I was a reckless fool who’d try to burst a firecrackers in his hands! The more I think of this symmetry or asymmetry depending on one’s point of view, I think I have lived two lifetimes.  

Death of a Salesman

In the spring of 1948, Arthur Miller disappeared into his log cabin somewhere in Connecticut. He emerged out of it some six weeks later ready with his first draft of his play ‘ Death of a Salesman’. And as they say rest is history. It won the Pulitzer prize for best drama  that year and when it was premiered on Broadway the following year, it created massive waves and huge critical  acclaim for Arthur Miller as a playwright. When I read this play recently, I underwent most of the emotions that our anti hero Willy Loman goes through and that to my mind is the beauty of great work of fiction. It brings you face to face with your innermost core that you knew existed but were hardly aware of and this work of his also tells you what can happen when you lose the grip on the forces of life. The passage of time has not dated the topicality or relevance of this timeless classic.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

Having finished a densely written 422 pages ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, I can say with utmost conviction that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a master spinner of yarn of the finest quality. The fabric that he creates in the form of this novel has a texture of magic realism and is designed with the uneven patches of Colombian history interspersed with the trials and tribulations of the Buendias family. The fictional village of Macondo could be taken as a microcosm of the Colombian nation. It is a great work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose whole career has been defined by this one book although he has written several others and which former president Clinton has been on record saying it as his all time favourite novel. Some people may find it a difficult read because the narrative though linear at one level, also stretches back and forth in time and adopts this tragi-comic tone throughout and where the mundane and extraordinary events take place simultaneously and seamlessly merge into each other to create a world like no other. So if you stay with it, you will get sucked into his web. I have no doubt in my mind that Salman Rushdie has drawn heavily from the style of Mr. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and that MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN has its template this luminous ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.

[Bitter harvest ]

There has been a colossal tragedy in the foothills of the mighty Himalayas. Over a thousand dead and still counting. And one can’t even accurately assess the magnitude of the destruction of properties and livestock. The fury of nature knew no bounds and the catastrophe has indeed been of Biblical proportions. You can’t but be saddened by the scale of this human suffering. But why do I have a kind of mixed emotions about the whole thing? Why do terms like ‘just deserts’ and ‘they had it coming’ doing summersault in my head?  Disasters at the pilgrimage sites in this country is not a new phenomenon in fact, it has become the norm rather than exception. This latest catastrophe could be attributed to the wrath of nature but the man has done his utmost to contribute in equal measure to this terrible tragedy.  It is a very fragile ecosystem in the foothills of not only the Himalayas but almost all the biodiversity hotspots where these religious sites and shrines are located. The nature has managed to achieve a very delicate balance over there. But in this day and age of the mammon, everything is an opportunity to mint money and what we are witnessing is that a lot of unscrupulous elements in cahoots with builder-politician-bureaucrat nexus have wreaked havoc at these places by attracting ever larger number of people when in actual fact these so called holy places are just not meant to be visited by such a huge throng of people no matter what. That is where the ever increasing religiosity in our society comes into the picture. Year after year, the throng of people visiting these places is getting humongous which has had a terrible cost on the fragile ecology and limited infrastructure along these sensitive zones, but the greed of some people knows no bounds. Lots of guest houses have been constructed right up to the river banks in the shallow waters and when these were buffeted by heavy flooding due to swollen rivers, they collapsed like house of cards resulting in so many losses of lives.

The larger point I would like raise is this growing craze of the Indian middle classes to visit ever exotic religious places in such a huge and unmanageable numbers that would stretch the resources of any place never mind these fragile and delicate zones like the foothills of the Himalayas.  I have very little idea where my latent rage trying to aim at, but I’m frankly appalled at the ever increasing religiosity among a growing section of the middle classes. It would be all worthwhile if this religion thing had helped the people becoming more compassionate and ethical in conducting themselves in the real world, but unfortunately the reverse is the case. What these millions gathering at such places denotes is a kind of unbridled consumption in the Gods market; every pilgrimage site has become a religious super market where you would like to flaunt your ability to consume in ever greater numbers at the wares on offer. I mean how smug they are in their certitude about their place in the larger scheme of things, these people who wouldn’t bother to give alms to a beggar or a leper, would go to any extent to strike a bargain in the divine marketplace. When something goes wrong, like this recent calamity for instance, they would blame the same Gods with whom they had come to bargain in the first place! Ultimately, you have to accept that your blind faith may give you momentary respite from your pain but what about suffering? There is no getting away from it for pain is external but suffering is internal. Whether you do good or you do evil, suffering will always be your reward and there is no escaping the punishment. So why bother the Gods  needlessly.