Tailor Birds

Lately, the trees around my building have been mobbed by a gang of tailor birds.  I wish I could catch them in a group but they're flighty and constantly on the move. But, they're so tiny that if it weren't for their rapid high pitched calls, I would have never known they were visitin in the first place.   

Rainwashed Powai

A Green Curtain

The building that houses my office and all the adjacent buildings sits on a low ridge carved out of the rock of the hill behind it. Ever since it started raining, the ugliness of exposed rock has given way to a lush green curtain. The hill is home to dozens of birds. I just wish I could spot them all; people must think I'm a little odd when I stop and stare at seemingly nothing.

The World That Never Was - A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents by Alex Butterworth

The World That Never Was is a dense work that explores nineteenth century idealists and Utopians (and alleged terrorists) whose cliques were often stealthily penetrated and subverted by forces antagonistic to them, usually of the state. If this were a novel, I'd be mightily ticked off by its writer for infusing in it a mind-boggling number of characters. But, we can't possibly blame Butterworth, the poor Charlie was only reporting history. If I were to be asked for names, I could probably only offer Prince Kropotkin, Henri Rochefort and Louise Michel, the last of whom - the Red Virgin of Montmartre - I quite liked. In fact, I found the bits on the Paris Commune very interesting. I can't say the same about the Russian bits (of which there are a lot) which have an atmosphere of bleak moroseness, not surprising given the depressing nature of Russian history. It isn't that I don't enjoy a cognitive challenge, it's just that I want entertainment and if that makes me intellectually moribund, so be it. The World That Never Was is well researched and creates an interesting narrative across countries and decades. But, it's a fiendishly arduous read, definitely not one for a lazy weekend.

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

In the second installment of his urban fantasy series, Aaronovitch takes us back to his alternate version of London where the Metropolitan Police have a seriously understaffed department called the Folly which handles some rather unusual cases. We reencounter Peter Grant, the amiable but clumsy constable from the first book – Rivers of London, as he and his boss Thomas Nightingale, try to unravel two befuddling sets of events. Mutilated corpses of men start appearing all over the city, bodies whose “wedding tackles” appear to have been bitten off. Grant and Nightingale suspect this to be the work of an obscure creature with a vagina dentata (no need to explain I hope). But, their attention is deflected elsewhere when a number of jazz musicians drop dead after performances. Jazz, both its history in London and the contemporary scene, runs strong through Moon Over Soho. Something I didn’t notice in Rivers of London is Aaronovitch’s fascination with suburban architecture and interior design. Here are some instances:

“Chez May was easy to spot, a 1970s brick-built fake Edwardian cottage that had been carriage-lamped and pebble-dashed within an inch of its life. The front door was flanked on one side by a hanging basket full of blue flowers and on the other by the house number inscribed on a ceramic plate in the shape of a sailing yacht. I paused and checked the garden; there were gnomes loitering near the ornamental birdbath.”

“Between the end of the beach huts and the open-air swimming pool was a strip of grass and a shelter where we finally got to sit down. Constructed in the 1930s when people had realistic expectations of the British climate, it was brick-built and solid enough to serve as a tank trap.”

“His house was a two-story Edwardian terrace on the “right” side of Tooting Bec Road.”

“I grew up in Kentish Town, which as an area would count as a leafy suburb if it was leafier and more suburban. And if it had fewer council estates. One such is the Peckwater Estate, my ancestral seat, which had been built just as architects were coming to terms with the idea that proles might enjoy indoor plumbing and the occasional bath but before they realized that said proles might like to have more than one child per family. Perhaps they thought three bedrooms would only encourage breeding among the working class.”

“Fortunately, the Folly had been built in the Regency-style when it had become fashionable to build a separate mews at the back of a grand house, so that the horses and the smellier servants could be housed downwind of their masters.”

“Jason Dunlop lived in the half-basement flat of a converted early-Victorian terrace on Barnsbury Road. In previous eras the servants’ quarters would be fully underground, but the Victorians, being the great social improvers they were, had decided that even the lowly should be able to see the feet of the people walking past the grand houses of their masters—hence the half basement. That and the increased daylight saved on candles, a penny saved is a penny earned and all that. The interior walls had been painted estate-agent white and were devoid of decoration, no framed photographs, no reproduction Manets, Klimts, or poker-playing dogs. The kitchen units were low-end and brand-new. I smelled buy-for-lease and recently too.”

“I’d been expecting something Gothic but this was more like a Regency terrace that had escaped to the countryside and had shot out in all directions before some cruel architect could round it up and pen it back into its original narrow frontage.”

“It’s another typical outer London village that acquired, in short order, a railway station, some posh detached villas in the late-Victorian style, and finally a smothering blanket of mock-Tudor semis built in the 1930s... Chez Adjayi was a big detached Edwardian villa along a road lined with variations on that theme. Apart from a token oval of greenery, the front garden had been paved with concrete, the better to park a couple of big German cars conveniently in front of the house.”

“Simone led me up a third flight of stairs that doglegged around some bizarre retrofit put in back in the 1950s when this was a flat for French maids and ‘Ring top bell for models.’”

“The bungalow was a hideous redbrick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracey Emin instead. The interior was as characterless as the exterior, World of Leather sofa, generic flat-pack furniture, fitted kitchen. There were three separate bedrooms, which surprised me.”

“In the 1950s and ’60s property in Soho was cheap. After all, who wanted to live in the middle of smoky old London? The middle classes were all heading for the leafy suburbs and the working classes were being packed off to brand-new towns built in the wilds of Essex and Hertfordshire. They were called New Towns only because the term Bantustan hadn’t been invented yet. The Regency terraces that made up the bulk of the surviving housing stock were subdivided into flats and shopfronts, basements were expanded to form clubs and bars. As property prices started rising, developers snatched up bomb sites and derelict buildings and erected the shapeless concrete lumps that have made the ’70s the shining beacon of architectural splendour that it is. Unfortunately for the proponents of futurism, Soho was not to be overwhelmed so easily. A tangle of ownership, good old-fashioned stubbornness, and outright corruption held development at bay until the strange urge to turn the historic centre of British cities into gigantic outdoor toilets had ebbed. Still, developers are a wily bunch and one scam, if you can afford it, is to leave the property vacant until it falls derelict and thus has to be demolished.”

It does seem a tad improbable that a book like Move Over Soho should have social commentary pertaining to urban architecture and town planning. The premise of the book is very silly. Honestly, jazz vampires? But, it is a lot of fun and I finished it one sitting. I need more books like Move over Soho in my life; stress-free, humorous, entertaining and most importantly fast-paced. I have to admit though that Aaronovitch's publisher is going for a bit of an overkill; two books released in the same year and one more's expected before the end of 2011. Still, as long as they're enjoyable.

You can read my review of Rivers of London here.

Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly

At the very beginning of this extraordinary book, Connelly remembers a dinner in a rundown restaurant in Rangoon’s Chinatown. Around the table are local intellectuals - deemed dissidents, and foreign writers. Towards the end of the meal, the diners “are drowsy—the old poet has nodded off, twice, snoring so loudly that he wakes himself up again—but my companions are still hungry for more information, more news, more evidence of the ongoing life of the world, and how their own country, how they themselves, are connected to that world—the realm of freely circulating ideas and books and newspapers and technologies. Freely circulating people, in fact... bring our worlds with us. In an isolated place like Burma, this kind of meeting is also communion that vivifies, renews, the way colour comes as a mind-sparking pleasure after weeks in a monochromatic hospital ward.” The Burmese military junta has kept the country closed to the world for decades. The Burmese, though, haven’t lost their love of learning and despite the repressive thought policing, they hunger for ideas. Burma was once Asia’s most literate country, a position it held for centuries; monastery schools educated both boys and girls. Much later in the book Connelly summarises the qualities she admires in the Burmese as "their love of literature and art, their openness to the world, their ability to bring the world into their own experience, their intellectual generosity, their enthusiasm for learning and for teaching."

Reading through these preliminary chapters that assert Connelly’s admiration for Burma’s people, it seemed as though the sub-text – A Love Story – on the cover naively declared the author’s infatuation with the country. I couldn’t help wondering if this was going to be a sycophantic travelogue, one written like a pensive novel. How wrong I was. I was missing context which unfortunately the book’s prologue doesn’t provide. Connelly is a well-known Canadian writer and poet. As a 17-year old, she lived in provincial Thailand as part of a rotary exchange program. She returned to Thailand in her mid-twenties and from there on to Burma and then lingered on the Thai-Burma border. The experience she gained during this time enabled her to write The Lizard Cage, a novel about an imprisoned Burmese dissident. But, it was only years later that she willed herself to write a memoir, a back-story to The Lizard Cage – an all embracing love story from Connelly’s love for the Burmese in general to her love for one Burmese man in particular.

Connelly goes to Burma to collect information about an imprisoned writer, Ma Thida. At times, she plays the part of the tourist, going up north to Pagan where perched on a ruined temple, she observes the plain below transformed into a “red and gold fire, the mist burned away to reveal the land’s bounty: more than two thousand white-and-gold-tipped stupas, crumbling pagodas, sister and brother temples, lines of toddy palms, the immense gray Irrawaddy River, wide as a small lake.”  But, she’s keenly aware that her purpose for coming to Burma ought to be far greater than merely sightseeing – “When I got here, I was a tourist, and I enjoyed being one, revelling in the beauty and strangeness of this new world, confident, too, that I was not merely a tourist because I was aware of the dire political situation.”

She attempts to do this by reaching out to wary dissidents and by crashing demonstrations. At one such protest in the middle of the night, the oppressive force with which the authorities respond compels her to take refuge in the flat of a Good Samaritan. The next morning, she steps out and discovers that “It is a normal day. People cross the intersection. Smoke-belching buses hurtle over the spot where the protesters kneeled, reciting Buddhist sutras. Walking away from Hledan Junction, I pass a woman whose plastic baskets are packed with green leafy stuff and mangoes. She has just been to market. As though nothing happened here last night. As though no one was taken away.” More than anything, Connelly wants to connect with the situation in Burma in a genuine way. She thinks her writing will help her do this but she is full of doubt. Her apprehensions are amplified by those around her who ask “Don’t you think you will contaminate your writing if you become political? Art in the service of politics can only be propaganda.”

Connelly’s time in Burma is cut short by an expired visa and a perceived threat from the junta. She returns to Thailand where she meets Western women involved in the Burma struggle. She is curious about why they would choose such a path and one response in particular gets her thinking, “I decided I didn’t want to be an observer anymore. I wanted to be a participant, whatever that meant. The Burmese struggle is … remarkable. It made me think about human solidarity. Does that sound out of date? I suppose it is. But I guess I came to the point where I didn’t want to just watch the struggle. I wanted to struggle with them. And so, in a way, I do.” I do. Two small, fateful words.” Connelly, too, yearns to contribute, but she doesn't know how. At a party in Chiang Mai, she meets Maung, the head of an armed group of insurgents fighting the Myanmar army on the Thai-Burma border. She falls in love with him. The rest of this book is chiefly concerned with the intertwining branches of their unlikely relationship and Connelly’s travels through the refugee camps on the border.

I savoured Burmese Lessons. Connelly is thoughtful and articulate. She shares her deepest insecurities with us and as a consequence there’s an unexpected sense of intimacy running through the book. If you read Burmese Lessons hoping to discover more about Burma and the struggle against the junta, you’d be disappointed. Burmese Lessons is about a personal journey and it’s an exceedingly poignant one.

P.S. The snoring old man in the quote in the first paragraph of this post is U Tin Moe, one of Burma’s most celebrated poets. He too spent many years in prison. His bitter poem, Desert Years, contemplates the state of his country.

Desert Years

Tears
a strand of grey hair
a decade gone

In those years
the honey wasn’t sweet
mushrooms wouldn’t sprout
farmlands were parched

The mist hung low
the skies were gloomy
Clouds of dust
on the cart tracks
Acacia and creepers
and thorn-spiral blossoms
But it never rained
and when it did rain,
it never poured

At the village front monastery
no bells rang
no music for the ear
no novice monks
no voices reading aloud
Only the old servant with a shaved head
sprawled among the posts

And the earth
like fruit too shy to emerge
without fruit
in shame and sorrow
glances at me
When will the tears change and
the bells ring sweet?

by U Tin Moe (1933-2007)

Toba Tek Singh - Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto

I am discomfited by my benightedness when it comes to Indian writers who write in languages other than English. I learnt of Manto, a celebrated Urdu writer of short stories, through a play I watched several years ago. Manto Ismat Hazir Hain by Naseerudin Shah’s Motley productions explored four works by Urdu writers, Ismat Chughtai (1915 – 1991) and Saadat Manto (1912 – 1955), both of whom were infamous for their irreverent writing and often hauled into court to defend their work against charges of obscenity. My favourite, out of the four adaptations, was Lihaaf by Chughtai, a tongue-in-cheek tale of a young woman who stays over at her aunt’s. Sleeping in the same room nightly as her aunt and the maid, she discovers that what is claimed to be the sound of the flesh of grapes being wrested from their skins is something far less innocent. For the same performance, Motley also adapted two stories from Manto: Titwal ka Kutta and Bu. Ankur Vikal was particularly memorable as a philandering lay-about who reminisces about a night spent with a girl with a ‘special’ smell – “ek ghattan ki bu” as he puts it.

Both these stories find their way into this Penguin anthology under the names Odour and The Dog of Titwal. Interestingly, not all of the 15 stories are satirical or intended to scandalize. Two recurring themes in Manto stories are the lives of prostitutes and the partition of India. The titular story – Toba Tek Singh – describes an exchange of inmates rotting in asylums between the newly partitioned India and Pakistan; Hindu and Sikh lunatics to India and Muslim lunatics to Pakistan. One inmate, Bishen Singh, spouts gibberish and refuses to sleep. At the Wagah border, when Bishen Singh learns that his hometown Toba Tek Singh has been given to Pakistan, he goes berserk and runs off. Border officials allow him to wallow in the no-man’s land between the two countries – “There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth, which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”

I don’t dispute that this is a cleverly written piece of satire but it didn’t have the poignancy that I suppose it’s meant to have and I think that’s largely due to this theme being dated. You might argue that this message is as relevant as ever in light of the restive relations between India and Pakistan. However, the premise of many of Manto’s partition narratives rests on the sameness of cultures, akin to the pseudo-nostalgic line that the Times of India likes to toe for cross-border relations. That sameness was only ever really true for people from the Punjab. So today, this talk of similitude seems so phony when Pakistan, which even before it existed, was different from the rest of subcontinent (and when was India ever homogenous?) and since its creation, has followed a path which is wholly its own.

Manto is particularly weak with stories that deal with the sombre like the partition riots in Bitter Harvest. I can sense his intention but he’s unable to execute it successfully. I put this down to his strength, a voyeuristic flippant style best reserved for social commentary not rape and genocide. One sees the vigour of his writing in stories like A Wet Afternoon where a boy walks in on his sister in flagrante delicto with a friend and in A Woman for All Seasons, a comment on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But, you see the same style failing miserably in Colder than Ice where a Sikh man in the heat of foreplay describes to his paramour how during a riot, he abducted a beautiful Muslim girl with the intention of violating her, only to discover that he’d been carrying a corpse. I didn’t find this irreverent or shocking as I did crude.

Without reading more of Manto’s work, it’d be unfair to draw this conclusion but it does seem like Manto’s style is both limited and limiting.

A Visitor at Sundown

In the fading light of Sunday evening, a surprising visitor perched on the dead mast tree (killed last year by the idiots who burn leaves in the yard) outside my window. You hear them frequently but it's difficult to spot them because they're well hidden. The coppersmith barbet earned its name from its deep metallic tuk-tuk-tuk call, almost like a coppersmith hitting a piece of metal. In addition to realizing how woefully inadequate my point & click camera is, I also found evidence for that extraordinary phenomenon of language extending one's perception and altering the way one observes the world. Where I previously heard birds, I now hear tailor birds and fantail flycatchers. Where I previously saw trees, I now see cannonballs and copperpods. I see and hear them now because I can name them; that cognition is controlled by language as much as it is by the physical senses - an effect that's described in K. David Harrison's The Last Speakers.

Trees of Dadar Parsi Colony

This morning I went tree spotting with the fine folks from BNHS at Dadar Parsi Colony. I've always admired the verdure of the area when passing through. Now I am somewhat familiar with the names of many of the trees that call it home. It's tough remembering the names of all those trees, particularly because they come in triplicates - Latin-English-Marathi or Latin-Hindi-English.

Parsi Colony's tree-lined streets are usually pretty but they're gorgeous during the rains. All the trees look so happy.

I caught this electric blue bee snacking on the flower of a Mussaenda philippica, an ornamental plant originally from the Philippines.

All this damp is a red carpet for all manner of fungi like these interesting looking mushrooms.
The area is also famous for its African sausage trees (Kigelia africana) and there were loads.

Dr.Ogle who led the walk was full of stories. He also shed light on the mythological connections of some of the trees in addition to their botanical and pharmacological profiles. This for instance is the parijat also called the night-flowering jasmine (Nyctanthes arbor-tristis). Hindu legend tells of it being the source of conflict between Krishna's two wives who he then placated by planting the tree in the yard of the first such that each morning it would shower its flowers over the wall and into the garden of his second wife. It's also called the tree of sorrow because of the way it sheds its flowers towards dawn.

For the longest time, I referred to the Indian mast tree as Ashoka. The mast tree (Polyalthia longifolia) is very common and there are several in my building's yard. The real Ashoka (Saraca asoca) is the one in the photo above. It's of historical and religious significance. In ancient India, a Sakya queen named Maya is said to have gone into labour in an Ashoka grove and the tree offered a branch to support her. The child she gave birth to in that grove would grow up to become the Buddha.

Dadar Parsi Colony was established at the end of the 19th century to decongest Bombay after the city suffered repeatedly from plague. It's twin across the old Agra road is Hindu colony. The original buildings here date from 1920s and are a curious but comforting mixture of European and vernacular.

Among the vanishing species, although this one is architectural rather than botanical, are Bombay's balconies.

Buildings mounted with the faravahar declare the identity of their diminishing denizens. This area is claimed to hold the largest concentration of Zoroastrians anywhere in the world.

A lot of the old buildings have already given way to ugly redevelopments. But, the most surreal new building in Dadar Parsi Colony is Della Tower. For a just a moment or two, you feel disoriented and you mutter "What the!" Inspired by ancient Persian monumental architecture, it shouldn't be completely incongruous in the world's largest Zoroastrian locality. But, it does seem a little Disneyish - bas-reliefs inspired by those that line the Apadana Hall in Persepolis, human-headed winged bulls and bull-headed columns. It's all very kitschy. I can't decide whether I like it or hate it.

The locals were curious about what we were up to. They watched for a while before getting bored and going back to their newspapers and chewy toys.

One cheeky fellow joined the walk on the spur of the moment. He was with us the whole time, listening keenly to Dr. Ogle but didn't bother paying the registration fee. Here he is...

Stories in a Song directed by Sunil Shanbag

Last weekend, I watched Stories in a Song at Prithvi. I hadn’t really heard much of about this play but it was by Arpana and Sunil Shanbag, the theatre company and the director responsible for the much feted Sex, Morality and Censorship (which I am lamentably yet to see), so I decided to give it a go.

Stories in a Song was unexpectedly delightful. The play was thought up by Shubha Mudgal and comprises 7 pieces built around obscure or fading musical traditions from northern India. As I sat, waiting for the show to begin, I observed at length the small orchestral arrangement to the side. A harmonium, a tabla, a dhol and what I supposed was an electronic tanpura – all of these I noted with a sinking feeling. What had I dragged myself across waterlogged roads and testy weather for? Thankfully, Stories in a Song disproved my cynicism in the most wonderful way.

The first piece, Songs of the Nuns, was the most melancholic among the seven and also somewhat inadequate. Sourced from the Therigatha, an anthology of poems by Buddhist nuns (the earliest known example of women’s literature in India), their interpretation in song failed to capture the power or mood of the poems. The poems themselves, however, are fascinating and worth a revisit. Quite suddenly, we are taken away from this India of antiquity to an upmarket brothel in Mahatma Gandhi and the Tawaif Sabha. Ketki Thatte was superb as the tawaif who recounts, in speech and song, an encounter between the tawaifs of Benares and Gandhi. The third piece is adapted from Chandni Begum, an Urdu novel by Qurrat-ul-Ain Haider. In Chandni Begum, a struggling family of folk singers attempt to persuade an influential newspaper editor to print some promotional material. Nishi Doshi was particularly riveting as the coquettish Bela, the family’s winsome protégé, in her 1950s sari and flower-pinned chignon, enchanting the audience completely with her old fashioned singing.

The fourth vignette, titled Bahadur Ladki, was adapted from a work of the same name by Gulab Bai. It used nautanki, a folk theatre tradition involving singing, dancing and parody to tell the story of a courageous girl who in colonial times confronts a wicked British officer. Namit Das, who’s acted in several Hindi films, played the role of the leery officer with great aplomb. But the next piece, Hindustani Airs, was probably my favourite. It was apparently very fashionable in colonial times to collect and transcribe native music i.e. Hindustani airs. Pia Sukanya was outstanding as Lady Isabelle Harding, a memsahib, eager to learn a ‘Hindu’ melody from a nautch girl named Khanum Jaan played by Mansi Multani. It was so fitting to follow the faux-patriotism of Bahadur Ladki with the meeting of cultures in Hindustani Airs. Pia Sukanya’s theatrical 19th century accent was endearing but it was the aria she belted out at the end that seemed to win everyone’s hearts. This was followed by Whose Music Is It? - a thought provoking fable on the value of traditional music. Finally, there was Kajri Akhada and what a way to end a wonderful evening. Their take on kajri, a song form from Uttar Pradesh was hilarious as it was remarkable. The ever cheeky Namit Das stole the show once again with his English kajri and what a voice!

The fact that all the actors were such talented singers made it an exceptional experience. I laughed so much that I forgot that I would have to walk out into a squelchy, smelly city. Some things are definitely worth a trip through muck and Stories in a Song is among them. You can view a Youtube promo here.

Images CC Stage Impressions Vikram Phukan

A Timely Tree

The cannonball tree is truly a bellwether for upcoming seasons. Overnight, its canopy started to turn rusty brown and the street below is littered with the leaves that the tree cast-off. And how thoughtfully punctual - it's the 10th of June, the official start of the monsoon in Bombay (although it has been raining for over a week).

The cannonball is on intimate terms with what I presume to be a large copperpod (Peltophorum pterocarpum).

A Million Ethereal Beings

Imagine walking up a mountain in the middle of the night, close to the middle of nowhere. It's like you've been smothered with a large blanket.  All you see are celestial bodies above and tiny ethereal glowing beings all around you. Grassroutes, a Bombay-based company that specialises in rural excursions, organizes firefly-watching trips at the beginning of the rains when the fireflies emerge in their millions to mate.  The village they go to is near Bhandardara in the Western Ghats and they promise tents, river dips and mangoes and very reasonably priced. I'd love to go but just don't have the time. Maybe, next year. So much to do, so little time.   

Flikr cc image Fireflies by ®DS

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro is among my favourite writers. I am a great admirer of his style and I treasure The Remains of the Day. However, his subsequent work hasn’t been as brilliant. When We Were Orphans hovers around the average mark and Nocturnes a little above it. Intriguingly, Never Let Me Go is Ishiguro’s first foray into science fiction but speculative is probably a better label.

Three friends, Kath, Ruth and Tommy live at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school in rural England. The story is narrated in characteristic Ishiguro style by a thirty-something year old Kath in a series of reminiscences. Hailsham and the students who live there seem enigmatic. They don’t refer to their parents or the outside world. They are watched over by guardians who encourage them to be creative and produce works of art. Some of this art is taken by a mysterious visitor who the students call Madame. They postulate that the best of their work is exhibited in a gallery but they don’t discuss this with their guardians. Kath closely observes her friends as they enter intimate relationships but she herself never participates in these budding romances. Despite her close bond with Tommy who is often scorned by other students for being different, she watches resignedly as he and Ruth start dating. The dynamics of the relationship between these three friends sets a tone of regret which is typical of Ishiguro’s work. In the background to all this is the eerie purpose for which the students of Hailsham are being reared.

I enjoyed the Ishiguro’s distinctive style immensely in Never Let Me Go. I wasn’t expecting an action packed plot, yet I did feel that it was a little too brooding and draggy. I think Ishiguro could have created the mood he wanted without so much procrastination in his plot. And as with all his books, Never Let Me Go ends with Kath’s despondent acceptance of her life and destiny, leaving many questions unanswered.  

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

I really enjoyed Bacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, and I’ve been on the prowl for his second for months now. Like The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker is a biopunk story, set in a dystopian future where seas have risen and fossil fuels have run out. The story takes place on the Gulf Coast of the erstwhile United States. Gangs of wretched adults and children eke a bare bones existence on the beach by stripping old ships for their metals. This is YA fiction so the protagonists are inexorably young.

Nailer, works on the light crew, stripping ships for wire and small parts before the heavy crew move in to salvage larger pieces. His crewmates like him are all children whose small bodies enable them to crawl into the crevices and ducts of rusting hulls. They are children who crawl through rusty pipes each day and go to sleep hungry every night. They fear growing too big because Bapi, their avaricious boss will kick them off the crew. Nailer also has to worry about Richard Lopez, his perpetually junked-up father who when not lounging about, is probably beating his son. Fortunately, Nailer does have some friends who care about him like his crew’s team leader Pima and her mother Sadna. The coast is regularly battered by savage storms called city killers. After one such storm, Nailer and Pima discover a wrecked clipper ship, a modern wonder that skims the oceans using high altitude winds. Hoping to strike it rich with the potential salvage on the ship, Nailer and Pima find a survivor among the dead crew. The girl, Nita Chaudhury, turns out to be the daughter of a super-important shipping clan, caught in some sort of corporate insurrection. And Nailer takes on the challenge of delivering Nita into safe hands by making the difficult journey to Orleans, a follower city to drowned New Orleans, but located in Mississippi which forms the new coastline. It’s a pretty despondent vision of our future but pretty credible, could even be a realistic description of post-Katrina New Orleans.

“The great drowned city of New Orleans didn’t come all at once, it came in portions: the sagging backs of shacks ripped open by banyan trees and cypress. Crumbling edges of concrete and brick undermined by sinkholes. Kudzu-swamped clusters of old abandoned buildings shadowed under the loom of swamp trees.”

As in The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi paints a bleak, changed world. The polar caps have melted and sleek clippers harness the power of high altitude winds to sail over the pole to Japan, hazarding attacks by Inuit and Siberia pirates who turn to piracy after losing all means of sustenance. The only currency that holds any value comes from China. Capitalist enterprise, however, is thriving. Large companies buy scrap metal from the ship breakers at low prices. These trades are the only time the ‘swanks’ stop by the malarial coast, guarded by packs of half-men, genetically engineered creatures possessing attributes of humans, dogs and tigers.

The first half of Ship Breaker was excellent. I didn’t really get the feeling that this book wasn’t really meant for my age group. Bacigalupi doesn’t short-change us on the brutal, filthy lives of the ship breakers. However, when Nailer finds Nita and then goes off on a quest to return her to her family, everything falls far too neatly into place. I was a little disappointed with the execution of the climatic chase scene and its subsequent resolution. I suppose it would to be unreasonable to expect a more ‘grown-up’ ending like in The Windup Girl. A constant message in Ship Breaker is about doing the right thing, almost Bhagvad Gita-like. “Killing isn’t free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It’s always a trade” is advice that Nailer gets from his friend’s mother. This theme, like the book won’t appeal to everyone but you can’t argue against its relevance in these ecological unsound times.

Palm #6

Coconut palm (Cocos nucifera)
Origin: Debatable, perhaps Indian or Pacific Ocean rim

Palm #5

Sylvester palm (Phoenix sylvestris)

Native to India

Bossypants by Tina Fey

I haven’t enjoyed American sitcoms for the longest time save a couple of outliers. The first time I watched 30 Rock was in the middle of a mouthful of ragda pattice impersonating rissoles on a Jet Airways flight. The rissoles predictably were nothing out of the ordinary but the same couldn’t be said about 30 Rock. I’ve been hooked ever since. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those loony fans who think it’s the best show ever. In fact, I reckon it’s only moderately funny. The humour is a little too over-the-top and the pattern of jokes, a little repetitive. What I really like about 30 Rock is its lead character, Liz Lemon, played by Tina Fey who is also the show’s head writer and producer (both on screen and in real life). It’s kind of embarrassing to admit but in many ways I resemble Liz Lemon. In one episode, Liz Lemon unwittingly becomes a relationship expert; an opportunity she uses to write a book which she claims is her next big thing, her means of survival when the show dies. Aping her reel life, Fey too has written a book, her first. Unlike its 30 Rock equivalent it doesn’t dispense harsh relationship advice, instead, it’s part memoir, part stand-up comedy and part management guide.

Bossypants is one of those books which is much better heard than read. Fey’s voice amplifies the wit in all those one-liners in a way that boring old text could never do, particularly the way her voice drops to deliver her sarcastic asides and afterthoughts. There is a longish rant about Photoshop that’s quite funny:

“A lot of women are outraged by the use of Photoshop in magazine photos. I say a lot of women because I have yet to meet one man who could give a fat turd about the topic. Not even a gay man. I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society… unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool. Do I think Photoshop is being used excessively? Yes. I saw Madonna’s Louis Vuitton ad and honestly, at first glance, I thought it was Gwen Stefani’s baby. Do I worry about overly retouched photos giving women unrealistic expectations and body image issues? I do. I think that we will soon see a rise in anorexia in women over seventy. Because only people over seventy are fooled by Photoshop. Only your great-aunt forwards you an image of Sarah Palin holding a rifle and wearing an American-flag bikini and thinks it’s real. Only your uncle Vic sends a photo of Barack Obama wearing a hammer and sickle T-shirt and has to have it explained to him that somebody faked that with the computer. People have learned how to spot it.”

And some useful advice on photo shoots because “In case you ever find yourself at a magazine cover shoot (and you might, because Snooki and I have, so anything can happen!), let me tell you what to expect.” Bossypants has strong feminist leanings but it’s so hilarious that I reckon that even a misogynist won’t mind some of the polemics. But, just like 30 Rock, Bossypants tends to be little over-the-top and the jokes are ever so slightly repetitive. Ergo, Bossypants is best enjoyed in small, regular doses.

Palm #4

Fishtail palm (Caryota)

Origin: Not sure which species but definitely not Caryota urens which is native to India

Palm #3

Royal palm (Roystonea)

Origin: Tropical America, seeds can be used as a coffee substitute

Palm #2

King sago palm (Cycas revoluta)

Origin: southern Japan, not a true palm but a cycad

Palm #1

Palmyra palm (Borassus flabellifer)

Native to India and the state tree of Tamil Nadu

Hiranandani Palms

"Palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss"
R&J, William Shakespeare

According to Dr. Almeida (of The Trees of Mumbai fame), Hiranandani Gardens, Powai has the greatest variety of palm trees in the city, perhaps in the country, with more than 200 species! It seems so unlikely because I work in this surreal neighbourhood which for all practical purposes in an exclave in the city with its greco-punjabi architecture and bronze animals. Sure, I see palms every morning (and evening) on my ride up the hill to my office - but 200 species? This is a mystery worth investigating. Please bear with my poor photography as I attempt to catalogue the palms of Hiranandani Gardens.

Flickr cc image Palm Trees by astronomy_blog

Purple Delights

There are few things as trying as an Indian summer and by that I'm not referring to a wussy period of mild unseasonal warmth. I'm talking about the real deal. Fortunately, there are some things that make an Indian summer worthwhile and nothing affirms that better than my most favourite fruit - Jamun (syzygium cumini). Pavements are littered with purple splotches, birds, monkeys and squirrels go gaga over it, it stains your teeth lilac and lingers on your tongue for hours.  I love it, especially the plateful I'm savouring tonight - delectably fat and juicy.