I sold my soul

to Nintendo:
On Wednesday evening, I found myself owner of a Nintendo DS Lite. It is red and black and when it gleams in the sun, it looks like it's grinning at me. It is also the first gaming hardware that I've ever owned. Why wait till now? Until a few weeks ago, I held two assumptions about the world of digital games: one, I'm not really a gaming person - Dungeons & Dragons, Counter Strike - remember the Southpark episode, Make Love, Not Warcraft (watch a clip from the award-winning episode) - that was my idea of gaming. Besides, I am really terrible at remembering which button does what, and what to press while scanning the area with a 360 degree camera view. Most of the time my character dies, gets badly wounded or does something illegal before two minutes are up (I wish I were exaggerating). Two, I didn't think games had much to offer with regards to tickling the intellect, that they were mostly mindless shooting, uninteresting graphics and non-engaging stories. That's what I assumed.

VERY VERY WRONG

Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Elite Beat Agents, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - these are responsible for my altered perspective. I am also interested in getting Trauma Center and Hotel Dusk - the latter for the film noir style and the former because it might be the closest thing I'd get to being a doctor and killing people.

Indeed, I stand shamefully corrected. I have learnt that just as there is a book for everyone, there is also a game.

Anyway, bookshopping today: Patrick Suskind's Perfume and Junichiro Tanizaki's The Key. It was only when I was paying ($14) that I realized today's purchases had a theme: cover nudity!

Notes on Tharoor, Huxley and Anthony

And no, the Anthony mentioned above is not the same Anthony whose book I've been reading for the past two months. _Transgressions in Art_ gets a bit tedious after a while; it's one of those books that is necessary to take slow, something like dating a really beautiful woman - you don't want to fuck it up by rushing through the main course.

Anyway, I started on Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel with glee, especially after reading so much about it on lit blogs and other online reviews. Suffice to say I raced through the beginning, laughing my way through, reminded very much of Rushdie's style in _Midnight's Children_, the writer and his audience, the run-on sentences, rhetoric questions, hyperbole, the ever-running thrope of inseparability between country and self, history and self, etc. I thought it was a particularly clever idea to use the Mahabharata in re-writing the history of independent India, to go back to a mythical past in order to re-tell a country's politics: fantasy versus politic, phantasmagoria against realism, past/present and the tragedy and unites them. Even though I cannot claim to have read the epic in its entirety, Tharoor's integration is quite seamless. You really don't need to know the original to read his version. I'm losing steam towards the end though, and while I admit this probably has more to do with juggling several books at once, I cannot deny that Tharoor's version of post-independence is a lot less exciting - fictionally speaking, of course - than the pre-independence period. Needless to say, he speeds up his plot by cleverly injecting poems where he knows, I think he surely does, his narrative is threatening to sedate readers. Overall, it's a sharp text, witty and undoubtedly patriotic and slightly anti-Gandhi - but it's fiction, so it's not like you can point a finger at him and say "But you have a moral responsibility to this text!" Be prepared for an entire barrage of alliterations, though.

A few weeks ago, a good friend introduced me to Piers Anthony, who has turned out to be one of the most readable fantasy writers I've come across. Each book in his 'Incarnations of Immortality' series stands by itself and does not require one to read everything to get an idea of the continuity, unlike a lot of fantasy literature. The basic premise is thus: Death, Fate, Time, Nature, War, Evil (Satan), and Good (God) are made of a group of humans who occupy the bodies of the immortals for a certain time until they have to hand their office over to the next in-charge. Thus, the order of the universe prevails. I've read Bearing An Hourglass and completed With A Tangled Skein last night. On the whole, the latter, which focused on the trials of the three aspects of Fate - Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos - I found to be lacking when compared to Hourglass which felt like it was a greater challenge to write, and hence a greater pleasure to read, due to the complexities I assume were involved in talking about the idea of time and time travel without slipping into heavy scientific jargon. Keeping in mind that I am not a feminist, I think with Tangled Skein, Piers Anthony was attempting to presume too much about the female psychology. There's a scene where a thiry-two year old grandmother strips with her twelve-year-old daughter and grand-daughter: "We're all women, there's nothing to be ashamed of". True, but still a disconcerting image. At one point, the aspect of Atropos was given over to the care of an old black woman, which made Anthony feel, for some reason, that his character should communicate in ghetto talk. For obvious reasons, this made her entire character highly laughable and two-dimensional, especially in the scene where she bursts into a teenager's room to find her with two teenage boys. After shooing them out, Atropos lectures this (presumably) black kid in some strange mix of grandmother-ghetto talk that proceeded to throw off the entire scene for me. Would it have been too much to assume that a black woman was capable of communicating without falling into a stereotype? In trying to make his character more authentic, Anthony misjudged the situation and turned the tables on himself, instead. Moral of the story: white men should never try to talk like anything other than white men. All this aside, Tangled Skein still retains a characteristically readable quality. Actions and events are packed tightly together, forming a constantly interesting, unputdownable narrative. Heck, I'll still recommend it.

And even though I haven't finished it yet, I should admit that I'm finally reading Huxley's A Brave New World. I know someone who read this at twelve. Wow, right? At twelve I was too busy getting through Sidney Sheldon.

India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul - A Response

It is hard for anyone to speak conclusively of India without running into potholes and jams. The only true thing, I think, that can be said about it are the ones involving historical dates and facts (India gained political independence in August 1947, This movie was a box-office hit/flop, etc); anything slightly resembling opinion - however necessary it may be for discourse - can easily escalate into controversial status. This was my experience with Naipaul's essays. I told myself it would be wisdom beyond my years if I chose not to write about A Wounded Civilization (mostly because I don't know enough, nobody knows enough, and sometimes even while similar facts elicit vastly differing opinions, imagine what differing facts, upbringings and influences can do) but this afternoon, some sort of demonic impulse took over that begged a response to Naipaul's response to India. At least I had the good sense to place this disclaimer right here where you can read it. Clearly.



It has been 33 years since the book was published and plenty has changed, but I still had to put down Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization after a while (thirty pages from the end) because it became too much to stomach. While an argument can be made for its "stark honesty" (shouldn't it be stark misunderstanding or stark anti-Hinduism?), I think Naipaul's approach to India's post-Emergency problems are terribly myopic and negative. Granted, he is an excellent writer, which was probably the only thing that kept me reading despite the author's closed observations on Indian culture and society. The entire thing strikes me as a series of laments and wonderfully-worded complaints. 'India will go on', he keeps repeatedly quoting R.K. Narayan in a somewhat sing-song sarcastic manner, which began to grate on my nerves after a while, no thanks to the implication that India will go on partly because their religious influences make Indians simple-minded, self-contained, and blind to their own problems. He uses the analogy of Narayan's fictional town/village, Malgudi, to make a point:

"The small town he has staked out as his fictional territory was, I knew, a creation of art and therefore to some extent artificial, a simplification of reality. But the reality was cruel and overwhelming...To get down to Narayan's world, to perceive the order and continuity he saw in the dereliction and smallness of India, to enter into his ironic acceptance and relish his comedy, was to ignore too much of what could be seen, to shed too much of myself: my sense of history, and even the simplest idea of human possibility." (21)

What I first thought would have been a fair metaphor for the disparity between South Asian literature and India's reality turned out to be a fair metaphor for the disparity between South Asian literature and V.S. Naipaul's personal inability to come to terms with seeing through Narayan's eyes - only I don't think he realizes it. But that is precisely the joy of Narayan's fiction: he created, with his Malgudi, a small village emblematic of his South Indian experience; his characters are sincere and human; they are simple in the way a city-dweller comes upon a village and sees its lack of electricity as simple. According to Naipaul, it appears, to be true in fiction to India, one must not fictionalize India at all; include all the grit, dirt, disorder, mayhem and corruption. India, it seems, has to be chaotic, and anything less than that is an exercise in dishonesty. However, if his essays are a personal response to India and/or an attempt to negotiate with his ancestry, then I can understand why they turned out containing such bitter disappointment. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that this was written as an objective response to the problems India faced in the post-Emergency period.

In the midst of world change, India is unchanging, stagnating, unmoving; the stubborn cow in the middle of traffic has become emblematic of the stubborn Indian at the crossroads of change. Naipaul met a prince in Rajasthan who travelled outside of India. The prince's easy-going, bordering-on-nonchalance attitude, made Naipaul realize that "the world outside India was to be judged according to its own standards. India was not to be judged. India was only to be experienced in the Indian way". His observations are astute and sharp but I dislike the way he does not leave any room for growth or suggestion. Here is Naipaul, whose family two generations ago moved to Trinidad, who has come back to India to poke holes in the form of social inquiry on the fabric of Indian society. His anti-Hindu stance is only all too obvious; they are too involved in their myth, he says, they are hypocrites, instead of helping the poor they cripple them - I am unsure if his points hit the spot because they are true or because his sentences are craftily constructed but one thing is sure: his process of social inquiry borders on the insulting. Again, he says, 'India will go on', but it will only go on because it is removed from the forces inflicting change, because it is complacent, because the Hindu equilibrium maintains itself by absorbing itself in the past, in its mythos, by going back to the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the great epics of old. What is this karma and dharma, Naipaul asks, what is this simplicity and Gandhi's poverty? This is old-fashioned and we have to wake up, India, and move ahead!

What I do agree with (but only halfway, or even less) is one of his main concerns which is that India clings on so desperately to a past that inadvertently affects and resists its own growth, as though if they [the Indians] were to let it go, it might just disappear altogether along with whatever notions of identity that have come to be associated with it overtime. It is a notion a few decades outdated, though; the situation has changed with time; now, I think it foreign media that is more concerned with associating India with its epic past and mythology (after all, it is, to the rest of the world, still the mystical east), an attempt that has created a certain image of the Indian identity that has inevitably rubbed off on the people themselves. A large amount of identity is constructed, whether by perceptions, languages, social hierarchies, media, famous personalities, art or literature; it is hard, possibly damn near impossible, to come to a pure, unaffected and unaffecting identity; an identity without influences organically recreating itself, and then affecting the minds of hundreds of millions - something like the effect of Saleem Sinai's telepathic midnight conferences in Salman Rushdie's novel. It is an idealistic approach, and borders on - perhaps even crosses over to - magic (!), which is all very well in literature, but not otherwise.

This talk about Indian identity, about how in the Economic Times of India when a writer unconscious of irony expounded on the necessity to "develop an attitude of detachment even while remaining in the thick of terrestrial pleasures", it is summarised sarcastically by Naipaul as "but India is India" - as though everything India does can be explained self-referentially. But statements like "India is India" abound everywhere in the text, and are nothing, I think, but Naipaul's attempts at coming to understand the country on its own terms, and I wish he'd admit that instead of being mocking and flippant about it or passing it off with causticity. India gained independence in 1947; A Wounded Civilization was first published in 1975. His is a cynical response to a country that has struggled through hundreds of years of foreign rule, barely achieved self-rule, and is just beginning to regenerate itself. Give it some credit, Naipaul.

BooksActually @ Tanjong Pagar

At the behest of Shaz, I found myself, after walking hundreds of metres in Singapore's prime queer district, up and down small hills littered with small shops and their small owners, closed eateries, stopping for a smoke occasionally and a random photograph (which, I thought, would serve to remind me of the way Tanjong Pagar can hardly hardly be experienced as anything less than kitschy, quaint and a little expensive) - we finally found ourselves at the opening of BooksActually. They sell firsthand copies of many interesting titles (I wish I'd employed the camera in this function because I've forgotten most of what I saw although I do remember it was mostly nice, if not a little limited); I liked the cover designs, they were nothing I'd seen in major bookstores like Borders or Kinokuniya. Lining the top of their shelves were rows and rows of Polaroid, lomo and film cameras. I saw Mark fiddling with a musical note sheet with punctures in the paper, and when he rolled the wheel on the side, a soft, little music filled the small space we occupied around the apparatus. I wandered over to a shelf and browsed the titles but I was immediately distracted by something that looked alarmingly like Alice. My eye briefly registered the price sticker (which said in Monotype font 8 $250.00). When I picked it up to look at it closely, I saw that in the wooden box, covered by a glass sheet, were the original illustrations of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland folded in such a way as to make the characters appear 3-d. For a while, I marveled at the design and wondered if I could make it myself. When I decided that it was possible, I put down the box and strolled off to another shelf.

They had delicious (free!) cupcakes, though, and the decor was lovely.

Amit Chaudhuri - Afternoon Raag

That I have been exceptionally lazy is undeniable. I cannot even say that I've been busy with school - I wish I have - but that is exactly what makes Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag the perfect book to talk about in lieu of the recent events which have come to pass. But before I do that, I want to wax lyrical about a new secondhand bookshop introduced by Yisa, a graduate in literature from NUS, who very wisely set up a Facebook account for it. By local standards, it is a relatively large space, chockful with rows and rows of books carrying everything between American Surrealist poetry to South Asian literature to old single-issue comics to critical theory. It is actually better than the rest. Three weeks ago, I bought Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization and Dead Souls by Gogol for a total of - would you believe it - $15. I went back today not because I'm out of books to read but because the idea of purchasing good quality secondhand books from a multitudinous selection was too much to resist; I bought Amit Chaudhuri's A New World and the much acclaimed The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor for $10 altogether.

In Afternoon Raag, Chaudhuri waxes lyrical about the pivotal moment that is the college years. He writes about a young Indian from Calcutta who gains a scholarship to study Literature at the University of Oxford. His entire novel, which is pretty short at a total of 144 pages (Vintage edition), reads like a tightly-woven piece of prose-poetry (he somehow manages to merge the fleeting heaviness of poetry with the fluidity of prose). There is something so sublime, insightful and yet deeply saddening about his passages. They flow gracefully, lyrically; his descriptions of Oxford in winter, the occasional flashbacks to his character's home and family in Calcutta drips heavy with nostalgia - and, mind you, this is not nostalgia of the sickening sort. His observations are acute, sharp and lucid. He finds ways to sync history, myth and fiction in a way that will make any romantic weep with joy.

I have not yet read his A Strange And Sublime Address but this book, I think, was the perfect introduction to his writing. Reading this, as a student of Literature, was an incredible experience. Chaudhuri's story is an afternoon raag, the perfect musing between the morning of awakening and the wisdom before retirement - in between is the music of negotiation, the coming-of-age and sensitive blooming of consciousness. Chaudhari weaves beautiful, musical images on a string and knots the ends together to make a continuous flow of precise comments about being a student and coming to understand the universe in a personal and honest way. Absolutely perfect and the best book I've read in 2008 thus far.