Accidental Blogger

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  • Some of my best friends …

    Animals entered my life very early. Since I was about four or five years old until I was a teenager, a parade of dogs and birds came through our home. I would become attached to every one of them and their death or disappearance invariably caused me grief. Even though all the family members were involved in the care of the pets, my mother noted that I tended to become unusually close to them. I was always very fond of cats but except for the occasional stray cat that was fed fish scraps and platters of milk outside the home, in the courtyard or the verandah, a pet feline had never lived with us. That changed in 1974 when one afternoon in New Delhi, I brought home a beautiful ginger and white kitten (probably a couple of weeks old) handed over to me by a group of frantic children on the street who were trying to save him from a big dog. I named him Tuni and he charmed the entire household with his friendly demeanor and beautiful looks. Tuni disappeared one day and never came back, leaving all of us sad and helpless. Many years later, (Omaha, 1991) at the urging of my son, we adopted a pair of kitties. They were brothers and we called them Raja and Ali. Playful, loving, friendly, each with his idiosyncratic ways, they kept us and each other engaged for many years. Raja succumbed to cancer in 2005 at the age of fourteen despite many heroic efforts on our part and that of our cats' wonderful vet, Dr. Cheryl Stanley. For the last five and a half years his brother Ali became my sole feline companion. Ali died at home last Saturday (January 15, 2011) peacefully, gracefully – suffering  from no discernible illness, pain or distress. He had been steadily losing weight in the last one year but there was really nothing much else wrong with him. He had slowed down but continued to enjoy life till the very end. Four months short of his twentieth birthday, he just drifted away due to old age. His death came rapidly and although I was not prepared for it, it was probably the best thing for him. The following is a message I wrote to a friend soon after his death. It captures my immediate and spontaneous recollection of the last hours with Ali and needless to say, at a time when I was very, very sad. 

    The house feels eerily weird. I have been functioning in a zoned-out way since yesterday. This morning was particularly hard when I got up from bed and Ali was not waiting for me to tend to him and serve him his breakfast.

    Ali had been showing his age in the last year or so but had remained in good health overall. Last Thursday evening, he began to show weakness in his hind legs and started to fall down while walking. He still was able to go to the bathroom and to his water bowl on his own. Since Friday morning his condition took a steady turn for the worse and he was having great difficulty in walking more than a few steps. Although he continued to drink water, he did not eat anything at all. On Saturday morning, we took him to see Dr. Stanley, his vet of many years, for an emergency visit . His weight was a mere 4.4 pounds, down from the already low 5.3 just a month ago. (Ali had weighed between 12 – 13 pounds in his prime) He was fading fast. The doctor said that although he did not seem to be in pain, all his systems were shutting down gradually and she predicted that he would not last the night. She gave us the choice of either euthanizing him or letting him die at home in his own time. Since he was not in pain or in any obvious distress, we decided to bring him home. Sudhir and I kept vigil over him – he was by our side all the time. Gradually, he seemed to go deeper and deeper into oblivion. He seemed to stir only on hearing my voice.

    Around 4:45pm, he stopped breathing and his heart stopped after a few long breaths. He was in my lap with Sudhir beside us. Amazingly enough, half an hour prior to that he had opened his eyes, raised his head, looked at me, meowed a few times and gently bitten my arm. After that he became completely quiet, except for his breathing which became shallower by the minute. I don't know what his final movement and meowing meant, whether he even knew me by then. But I will always remember that last gesture as his way of saying goodbye.

    I had a hard time when Raja died of cancer five years ago. But Ali kept me going in his absence, forcing me to tend to his routine. Now Sudhir and I are feeling disoriented without a cat around us. Our human children left home a long time ago and the cats kept the home lively with their child like presence and playfulness. I think with Ali gone, we have now become empty-nesters in the true sense of the word. I know that we will adjust, focusing on other things. It will be a different kind of life. But that's okay. Ali died the way he deserved to go – surrounded by love. Over time, I am sure the painful thoughts of Ali's last hours will be replaced by memories of the good times we had together, just  as it was for Raja and Tuni whose death and disappearance too were devastating for me. 

    I don't know how one takes an honest measure of one's life but if it is by counting the cats we have loved, it is probably as good a yard stick as any.

    Raja-Ali-1 (From left to right: Ali and Raja)

    Tuni-2 (Tuni)

    (I rarely write anything so personal on the blog. My husband and son urged me to write it in order to come to terms with Ali's absence in my life from now on.  Our animal companions are some of the best people we know.)

  • Libel-Shybel, Guilt-Shilt (narayan)

    My immediate reaction to Jesse's piece on the killings in Tucson was to write a story about cow dung. While Wikipedia doesn't acknowledge it, I could swear that my Wren & Martin grammar & composition textbook in high school listed parabola as a figure of speech. There was no reaction to my parable, a counter to pleas against rushing to judgment and rounding up the usual suspects. Call me daft, but it was my way of saying: why not call a spade a spade? As readers of this blog may surmise, I shy away from saying what I suspect a thousand other people will say in a given situation. Preaching to the choir is not my style. My mind wanders where it will. Parabola appeals to me, hyperbole too on occasion, but I try not to indulge in ellipsis, the apparent mode among blog commenters.

    While ruminating about the killings, mention of possible political motivations reminded me of "The Fixer". I remember reading the book when it came out in the sixties and not much else. What remains with me is the film version, with Alan Bates, playing the fixer, vehemently protesting his innocence, insisting frantically that he is apolitical. Yakov Bok, Bernard Malamud's uneducated eponymous handyman, is surely innocent of Aristotle's dictum that man is by nature a political animal. As the novel progresses, Bok is driven to hallucinatory madness by the degrading anti-Semitism of Tsarist Russia until we read, on the last page, "One thing I've learnt, he thought, there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed. Afterwards he thought, Where there's no fight for it there is no freedom. What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it. Death to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty!" Malamud doesn't clarify whether he is referring to men or Jews – I read both. We cheer for Bok as we cannot for Loughner, and Spinoza, despite his incendiary rhetoric, is still revered.

    Politics was the sole link in my mind between Bok and Loughner and I was embarrassed at the tenuousness of the connection I had made. The thought would have died there had not Sarah Palin declaimed, the very next day, that "journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible." If that weren't enough to roil the waters, Alan Dershowitz, never one to miss an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, proclaimed that "There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim." There is a distinction to be made, he maintains, between blood guilt and blood libel. In his hasty defense of Palin he fails to recognize that while her rhetoric may have been directed at the political man and not the mad man, it is significant that Loughner, a recipient, is both. I cannot believe that 'blood libel' and 'blood guilt' have entered common parlance to such an extent that Palin didn't have to go burrowing in Aryan lore for words of provocation. They have now.

    Blood guilt and blood libel of course are indistinguishable in "The Fixer". The terrorized Yakov Bok would not have cared for Dershowitz' niceties. The novel is a fictionalized retelling of the case against Menahem Mendel Beilis.  A Russian Leo Frank if you will, Beilis was falsely accused (the libel) of the ritual murder (the guilt) of a Christian boy. Happily, Beilis was acquitted; prudently, he left for Palestine, then lived out his days in the US. The fictional Bok is less fortunate and faces execution at the end of the book. Malamud, in describing his protagonist's despair, writes, "What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt." I admire Malamud's forthrightness. I wish I could believe that Palin is as punctilious as Dershowitz affects to be.

    What are we - a nation of lawyers who insist on calling a spade an alleged perpetrator? Are ruminants called to account when they unburden themselves?

  • More creative writing from Pakistan..(omar)

    The recent murder of Salman Taseer and the subsequent glorification of his killer by some parties has set a few Pakistanis on the path to creative writing. A few days ago I posted a story from Ahmed Asif and today we have another Asif stepping up to the plate…may their tribe increase.

    Meanwhile, yet another Asif has also taken up the topic. This one is a well known Pakistani "analyst", a retired army officer who is said to represent the views of the "deep state"….his humor may be un-intentional, but it is no less hilarious..

     

  • A rabbi and a mullah walk into a bar..(omar)

    A rabbi discusses sperm donation..

    A mullah discusses the art of wife beating…

    Another Rabbi offers his opinion on women drivers..

    And a pastor explains floods..

    And a Pakistani peers into the future..

    OK, the last one is a fantasy.

    My point? Well, I have two.

    1. That crazy is pretty much universal.

    2. But the Middle East and Pakistan still win the race because in the “Islamic core” (Razib’s useful term), the crazy is mainstream. Its not unique, its just uniquely mainstream.

    And yes, yes, I know this not the most important issue in the world.

    PS: feel free to share nuggets of wisdom from your local Pandit or Monk.

     

  • K.S. Radhakrishnan: A journey in search of shapes, space and Shantiniketan

    From time to time I write about artists, writers and other interesting personalities I come across in real life either by chance or by design. In late 2008 I presented Mimi Radhakrishnan and her work on our blog. After all the depressing news from Tucson and Pakistan that we have been discussing here for a while, this may be a good time to introduce the other half of the creative couple, the accomplished sculptor and Mimi's husband, K.S. Radhakrishnan. (Be sure to check out the excellent website)

    I have met Radhakrishnan and although we did talk about his art, I did not actually "interview" him as I did Mimi. In fact, I saw samples of Radha's sculpture for the first time when I was  in the basement of their home to see Mimi's paintings. The following piece is an excerpt from a lengthier profile of the artist written by my sister Mandira Mitra for another publication.

    Radhakrishnan-sculpture 

    As a young boy growing up in a village in Kerala, K.S Radhakrishnan, the noted Indian sculptor, came across a piece on Shantiniketan in a school textbook in Malayalam. It evoked in his mind a vision of another village in far away Bengal where art and education were being pursued in a non-commercial manner, a place that was described as an ashram. A seed of curiosity about the place was planted in the young boy’s mind but he continued to pursue his studies in Kerala right up to college. During his college days he learnt more about Tagore and his university and when he decided to study art he chose to go to Shantiniketan. For young Radhakrishnan, it was a journey from one village to another and he was quite oblivious of the geographical distance between the two.  In his mind an intimacy already existed between the place he started from and where he was going.

    In 1974, Radhakrishnan interviewed at Kala Bhavan, the art school in Shantiniketan; he was confident that he would be admitted.  The admission test included still life drawing and a creative composition. When the results were announced, Radhakrishnan’s name was not on the list of successful candidates. Disappointed, as he walked out of the office building, a person emerged from the building waving a sheet of paper in each hand. Pointing to them, he asked Radhakrishnan if they were his. As it happened, they were. The stranger informed the aspiring student that he would in fact be admitted in the Fine Arts course at Kala Bhavan. The person was none other than Professor Somnath Hore  a noted artist and sculptor. To this day Radhakrishnan recalls the image of Hore walking out with his arms extended, as a Jesus like figure coming to rescue his artistic future.

    Radhakrishnan had reached his destination but his journey continued. At the time, Shantiniketan had no formal boundary; it was an open space with no defined beginning or end to the university campus which was a continuum interspersed with various institutes, villages and rural market places. The atmosphere was relaxed and very informal.   Everyone sat on the floor whether in class or in the common grounds. The presence of a large number of girls on campus was also a new experience. (In Shantiniketan fifty percent of the seats were reserved for female students.) During meals in the general kitchen students from different disciplines interacted with each other. For Radhakrishnan, the experience of Shantiniketan as a whole was far more overwhelming than being just a student of Kala Bhavan.

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  • Brief and Scattered Thoughts From Tucson (Jesse Schaefer)

      Courbet

    As reports came in over the course of yesterday, I was struck by how quickly the mind seems to want to clean and polish and wherever possible use prefab mental structures to house a fresh crisis.  Many friends used the killings to engage in the tired game of bashing the imbecile Palin again, or to express anger at the hysterical conservative rhetoric that pervaded the most recent election.  The killer was obviously spawned from these forces it seemed to many (and I too understand that temptation).  But as we learned more about the killer it seemed to me that this Manichean reversion to political formula and the usual suspects, was at best a subject change, though perhaps therapeutically motivated from shock, or at worst a haymaking strategy with little substance, eclipsing the true tragedy at hand.

     

    My mind began to wander to other civic horrors.  The first political memory I have is sitting in the living room of my childhood Richmond District flat and being told by my parents that "a very bad man" had murdered Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk.  Immediately the juxtaposition showed a profound difference, as I reflected on the bitter and depressed, but rational Dan White and the surfacing psychotic youtube and myspace entries of Jared Lee Loughner.  No, Loughner was cut from a different bolt of cloth and this was going to be frustrating to accept.  There is still talk of an accomplice and perhaps it will turn out that some raging wingnut with elephant and teabag tattoos svengalied a very disturbed young man, but it seems unlikely to me.  At the moment we're left with the truly senseless act: paranoid violence borne from a brain on failure mode, the side effect of an organic aberration rather than the true evil we crave it to be.

  • Killer garlanded and showered with rose petals….(omar)

    Lawyers (presumably supporters of Islamist parties) showered Mumtaz Qadri, self-confessed killer of Governor Salman Taseer, with rose petals on his first court appearance. He was also garlanded with a garland of roses.

    This post can be read in conjunction with this one…the comments on the earlier post are also relevant.

     

  • Punjab Governor Assassinated for blasphemy..(omar)

    The Punjab Governor has been assassinated by one of his own elite force guards. The guard gave himself up and has now claimed on TV that he killed him for the crime of opposing the blasphemy law.

    The killer already has a hugely popular fan page on FB.

    His confession is on Youtube already. He says the punishment of blasphemers is death. And he prays that the prophet will accept him as his slave.

    And fans have made posters of the assassin (the title says "salute to the greatness of Ghazi Malik Mumtaz Qadri")Qadri 2

    I know people are trying to have the FB page shut down, but I think the page should NOT be shut down. People are not "radicalized" on this page, they come to this page because they are "radicals". Let others see them and see what the mindset is really like. Otherwise, we will be forever plagued by Westoxicated liberals whose only frame of reference is postmodern western academia and who only know this type of Muslim through the eyes of some professor in Columbia University or Berkeley…little brown children, bravely struggling against the hegemonic discourse of the west or some such…

    The hate was built up over time. Check out this video on youtube. And behind all such efforts, our brilliant intelligence agencies, working overtime to protect the nation.

  • A Caged Bird is Free (Sujatha)

    I had mentioned in my previous post that had I access to Rabindrasangeet recordings earlier on, I might have been able to appreciate them better.The example of lovely singing that I linked to was a rendition of a song by two of the Rabindrasangeet Trinity, so to speak – Kanika Banerji and Suchitra Mitra. Of the two, Suchitra's voice was the one that intrigued me more. It had an edgier tone, combined with clarity of rendition that led me to click on more than one suggested link with her name attached.

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  • A Thousand Year Writer’s Block..(omar)

    One Thousand Year Writer’s Block?

    William Burroughs famously remarked that Islam had hit a one thousand year writer’s block. Is this assessment justified?  First things first: obviously we are not talking about all writing or all creative work. Thousands of talented writers have churned out countless works of literature, from the poems of Hafiz and Ghalib to the novels of Naguib Mahfooz and the fairy tales of innumerable anonymous (and amazing) talents . There is also no shortage of talent in other creative fields, e.g. I can just say  “Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan” and be done with this discussion.  But what about the sciences of religion and political thought, or the views of biology, history and human society to which these are connected? Is there a writer’s block in these dimensions?

    0012 william burroughs

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