Month: March 2023

Why live? Why go through the ordeal of life? Why travel paths filled with pain and suffering? It’s a dilemma humanity has faced and thought about, for centuries. Literature is replete with such conundrums, sometimes disguised as declarations, on the pointlessness of life and the inescapable tragedy of every moment.

There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

There are more.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

And more.

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
Leo Tolstoy, My Confession

And many, many more.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.
Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

You get the idea, don’t you?

Care for a Challenge?

Long have I pondered over these thoughts too, an early quarter-life crisis ushered in by philosophers and authors who would fascinate and compel me to question the meaning behind any of it. Why wake up, why go through the same thing every day and hour and minute and second when you’re eventually going to die? Why go through the cycle of pain and suffering when it’s not going to bring you any feasible result in the end, only death and infinite oblivion? Why not embrace that earlier and skip through all the pain and suffering?

For any of my fellow readers who have wondered or still wonder the same question, let me try and persuade you to give The Tale of the Princess Kaguya a watch. The only motive with which I begin this argument is to show how this is one of the, if not the, greatest movies ever made, that the story is an assertive rebellion against Buddhist philosophy, a love letter to life itself, a story that finds meaning amongst meaninglessness. Not a tall order by any means, eh?

The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter

Meiji era Japanese Woodblock Print: The Old Tale of the Bamboo Cutter

It’s an old folk tale passed down over generations of Japanese families, of a princess who came from the Moon. Raised by a bamboo cutter and his wife, who found her inside a bamboo shoot, she grows to be an enchanting woman. Over time, the bamboo cutter would also find riches inside the same bamboo shoot, making him rich. As the princess grows up, stories of her captivating beauty would travel far and wide, resulting in different suitors coming and asking for her hand, only for her to set them nigh-impossible challenges to avoid marrying any one of them.

But the news of her existence would also reach the emperor, who would ask to see her. However, following her refusal, he visits her and immediately falls in love. When he tries to take her away, she threatens to disappear if forced. But soon, her time on Earth is over, and several heavenly beings would descend to carry her back to the Moon.

All of this is a well-known story, but it’s what Isao Takahata does with the folk tale that makes the ensuing piece truly magical. But before that, there’s some more info dump coming your way.

Buddhism and the Cycle of Rebirth

Bhavacakra (Wheel of Becoming) CCA-Mistvan

As per Buddhism, we’re all stuck in the cycle of samsara, or the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. It’s an endless cycle where you keep coming into a new existence every time you die, and in case you think it’s a good thing, ummm. It’s not. Life is a cesspool of suffering and misery and pain and as per Buddhist philosophies, the highest state of being you can attain is when you get beyond this cycle. Become free of this binding process.

It’s a concept that continually features across literature and philosophy, whether Eastern or Western (or Northern or Southern). Life is a pain in the ass, everyone unanimously echoes. Some of the optimists too. Not having a life is preferable to having one, everyone approves. That’s exactly why this movie creates such an impact. That’s exactly why this movie is what it is. It’s a love letter to the living despite showing the harshness that accompanies life on earth.

While the story in its original format isn’t so much of an elegy to life, the movie we’re talking about is. Very much so, and in the best way possible.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

It’s this little climactic conversation wherein the princess has to return to the moon with the celestial beings and Buddha himself (another change the movie opts for intentionally, I think) who’ve come to fetch her. A celestial being inches close, coaxing her to come with them:

In the purity of the City of the Moon, leave behind this world’s sorrow and uncleanness.

But the princess replies back, almost shouts, with utter indignation,

It’s not unclean! There’s joy, there’s grief. All who live here feel them in all their different shades! There’s birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, flowers… and feelings.

(The birds, bugs, beasts… line refers to traditional Japanese songs called Warabe Uta, something that frequently features in Takahata’s story, with a few modifications here and there.)

This. This is what lies at the heart of this magnum opus of a cinematic experience. The beauty in humanity, a fight against the cruel meaninglessness of existence. The meaning in emotions that surround you when you observe something larger than your definitions of beauty, something that suspends your time and space, leaves you in a daze. The meaning in love that you feel for someone, the sound of something sweet and tender, the taste of something hearty and delicious, the smell of something evocative and pleasant. Is that meaning not enough? Do those meanings not make it worth living?

It’s the little tweaks that Takahata adds to the story which incorporate new philosophical dimensions to the story, making it more interesting and complex. What if the princess wanted to come to earth instead of being sent? What if she missed her life even after her return to the moon (or death, as Takahata interprets it)?

All of a sudden, life becomes something to be desired, something to be yearned for, and that’s exactly what the movie does. Make you yearn for life.

The Coming Together of the Movie

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Studio Ghibli, 2013, dir. Isao Takahata)

As is usually the case, it’s not just the final product that’s awe-inspiring. Consider creating a movie primarily using hand-sketched images, each painted with watercolors. Each painting giving the impression of a rough draft, creating a dream-like sequence from the beginning to the end, while also paying homage to the art form of the era this story is said to have originated from. (A rogue chain of thought makes me wonder if the rough sketches are meant to symbolize the rawness and simplicity of life itself.)

As you would expect, the enormity of carrying out something this difficult and complex was immense, why the movie would fail to meet deadlines one after another. The film will be postponed several times during its production, with many wondering if it’ll ever be brought to its conclusion. Takahata, in his search for perfection, went for the time-tested methodology of trial and error and eliminating the errors one at a time, until all that was left was, indeed, perfection.

From the music of the film (during and after watching Princess Kaguya, it’s hard not to wonder at times if you’re taking a mindfulness session, what with its serenity and tenderness) to the symbolic color changes (in one scene, the insides of the mouth go dark, to symbolize the feelings of the character while simultaneously highlighting the tone of the scene), everything reflects the hours and hours of thought and work that has gone behind it.

And what better way to create a movie on the beauty and meaning of life than creating it in a way that affirms your philosophy too? It’s a work that shows all that humanity can achieve when it puts its mind to something. In Isao Takahata and His Tale of Princess Kaguya, Yoshiaki Nishimura (one of the producers of the film) says:

“This is my movie,” I told Mr. Takahata.

He laughed and said, “You’re right. When everyone thinks it’s theirs, you get a good movie.” “I made this. The more people who think that, the better it’ll be.”

Sums up how this magnum opus was brought to life: everyone made it.

Final Thoughts

It’s too easy too often to get lost in the daily drudgery of life we have, in this modern world. It’s too easy too often to give in to the pain and suffering that is an inevitable part and parcel of our lives. But sometimes, just sometimes, admiring the petal, which has traveled through the wind, crossing who knows how many oceans, to fall at your feet, is enough. To take in the smell and touch of a fresh gust of wind that wants to embrace you. It’s enough. To laugh at the futility of it all, to chuckle at the beautiful absurdity that is our world. It’s enough. All that. Just that.

Or as Takahata would say, as long as you can answer back by being alive.

On The Schadenfreude Optimism Of A Birthday: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

By Ashwin Glittus

On 27/03/2023

In Book Reviews

At a birthday party. The room is filled to the brim with cranky toddlers. One of them is crying because the choice of cake is not to a flavour of his liking. The cake in question is a store-bought sponge with bland vanilla frosting.

A clown barges in. He is tonight’s entertainment. Another kid starts crying. He has a phobia of clowns. The clown tries to console the kid. His smile. That spine-chilling smile with a smirk smeared with red that looks dangerously close to blood. The wailing continues, the clown gives up.

The person typing this has a phobia of clowns as well. But, he wonders, is he too old to cry? He can just walk out, right? But, the door is bolted. The rancid odour of the stale cake engulfs the room. He spots something. The clown has a gun.

It doesn’t take too long for the clown to pull out the gun and make the child stare down its barrel. The clown feels insulted. The clown looks at the person typing this and immediately rushes to him. Gun to the forehead, the clown threatens “you fucking rat!”

The host is trying to open the door. The bolted door. This is a house without any windows. This is a house situated in the remotest part of a rural settlement. The wailing and shouting barely permeate the walls and what’s audible is nothing more than a hum.

The person tries to continue typing. The clown snatches his phone and looks at what is written. He starts laughing and exclaims, “You’re trying to cash in on us? As typical as a writer can get?”. The clown throws the phone against a wall and it shatters to pieces.

The host hears a thud. She walks up to a neighbor. Nobody’s home. The host walks back to her door.

The clown tells everyone to lie on the floor. The person who just lost his phone spots that the gun is not loaded. He sneaks up to the clown and steals the cartridge from his pocket. The clown fishes in his pocket for the cartridge and that’s when the person says, “Looking for this?”.

The person and the clown get into a fistfight and the person manages to disarm the clown. He then loads the gun and points it at the clown. He uses the landline in the house to call the cops.

As soon as he hears the sirens wailing, he opens the door, gun in his hand, he leads the clown to the cops. The host stands stunned! The cops arrest the clown who turns out to be a fugitive on the run.

Nobody is in the mood for stale cake. The host asks “I have a couple of beers in the fridge, let’s have those instead?”. The person who is wondering about which phone should he get next answers, “But what about the kids?”. The host replies, “Who else will gorge on that cake?”. The person replies “Is it fit for human consumption?”. The host replies, “You have not lost your sense of humor even after being at the receiving end of a 9mm barrel!”.

I haven’t figured out what happens next. After watching a hostage drama on television a few years back, I wanted to write a novel that spans a single, drawn-out day where it is more about the atmospheric claustrophobia that a situation like this entails than merely a protagonist-antagonist thriller. I wanted to write something closer to what I would call domestic noir. Mauvignier’s novel reminded me of the book I wanted to write.

The Birthday Party is a hostage drama where, for a change, it is the drama that takes center stage. It’s as much about the characters as flesh and blood people as it is about the peril they are in. Laurent Mauvignier writes in long, serpent-like sentences that coil around the reader’s mind and gradually, through increasing tension, squeeze it to a pulp. As each sentence goes on, the claustrophobia builds to an almost unbearable crescendo and before long, there is barely room for even a sigh.

A sigh is the closest one could manage to a gasp of air, especially when the book is intent on drowning its reader in a sea of claustrophobia.

At a whopping 500+ page length, it could have ended up being a bloated affair, but the book is anything but that. On the contrary, in spite of spanning a single claustrophobically atmospheric day, this is a read that flies by, in spite of its deliberately slow pacing, giving the reader time and space to soak in each and every detail. Or maybe it flew by for me because I love slow pacing.

On Choices and Quandaries: Boulder by Eva Baltasar

By Ashwin Glittus

On 27/03/2023

In Book Reviews

I’m aboard a ship. A rust bucket to be more precise. A vessel that creaks to high glory. Down here in the ship’s dimly lit dining hall, a Madonna crooning from the lonely speaker nudged in a crevice, her tunes remind me of a while bygone. Dinner is served, and the meal is a lonely affair. Some mashed potatoes and a sauce whose colour and name I can’t discern to save my life.

A few moments later, the sous-chef joins me. She asks “How is the food?” and before I could answer, she says “You can be honest about it. I only blanched the vegetables and the head chef has already snoozed off in the throes of his extra glass of rum.” Since honesty is the order of the hour, I say “The potatoes are bland, but in a comforting manner. I’m not much of a spice person anyway.” Quickly she replies “That’s why you have barely touched the gravy!” We both laugh at this and she brings out, to my surprise, a bottle of Merlot. A few glasses later, she starts telling me something.

She doesn’t have a name. Or rather, the closest to a name she has is a nickname called “Boulder”. No, it wasn’t either of her parents. It was her girlfriend. Her name is Samsa. And before I attempt to draw any conclusions, she clears the air by saying “My story isn’t Kafka-esque even in the remotest manner!”. The girlfriend is almost an ex. They have been together for decades. Then one fine day, she wants to have a baby. A few arguments later, Boulder caves in and ten months later, the baby is born. Her name is Tinna.

Once Tinna is born, the grammar of their relationship changes. Tinna consumes Samsa’s existence and while the physical transformation has been endured by Samsa, the Gregor of our story in a way is the relationship between Boulder and Samsa.

At this juncture, Boulder asks me “What do you think? Should we have become parents or should I have put up a stronger force of resistance?” As someone who has only been a child and never a parent, I felt like I was in no position to answer. But, I had to bring something to the table, if nothing then at least for an extra glass of that delicious Merlot.

So, fishing for answers I went. My choice of pond was my parents’ marriage. It was arranged and like most arranged marriages, both barely knew what they were getting into. The marriage was undoubtedly a disaster. While surviving for twenty years under the roof with two children in tow, every alternate conversation was an argument. The classic case. One parent being present while one being absent. The absent parent trying their best to shun any responsibility pertaining to the children while the present parent striking arguments about why the absent parent is being so… absent.

Returning back to the conversation at hand, with something resembling an answer in my tow, I say “I had a present parent and an absent parent. But in my eyes, both were not ready to become parents. But in my parents’ case, even after twenty years, they barely knew each other. So, this answer in turn provokes a question, how and why does a person have a child with someone they barely know?”

Boulder replies in a stern manner “Instead of answering my question, you are bringing quandaries of your own to the table!”

My reply being “That’s what stories do. They spark quandaries that until then laid dormant in the darkest recesses of one’s mind.”

The ship with Boulder in it was in a book I was reading and my conversation with Boulder was my reading between the lines. That’s what great literature does. It compels you to read between “your” lines, have a dialogue with the characters while drawing parallels with your own existence. Boulder by Eva Baltasar, in a lean span of 112 pages, achieves that and much more.

Shattering the Fourth Wall – The Flair of the Self-Aware

By Nilay Bhatt

On 24/03/2023

In Essays

Long before Phoebe Waller-Bridge looked awkwardly into the camera and won the hearts of even the most stone-cold viewer and critics alike with her perpetually messy life as Fleabag, our article opens with a panning view of a house in the suburbs in the earlier years of this century. It is a rosy morning and our camera pans through the idyllic street gently littered with orange autumnal leaves, to the window that offers a glimpse into the life of a normal family, blissfully unaware of the voyeuristic eyes of hundreds of viewers picturing them in their heads through the screen of whatever device they are reading this article in.

Inside the house, a child sits in front of her TV set and claps her hands when a familiar figure in the now-iconic pink T-shirt, orange shorts, and a splashy purple backpack grins through the screen of the vintage television set. Her friend is an intelligent simian creature named after human footwear. “We had such an exciting trip today! What was your favourite part of the trip?” The valiant Dora the Explorer asks the little girl watching her adventures. “The lava mountain! The lava mountain!” The child shrieks in joy.

Her brother is a comic book aficionado and is sitting in the adjoining room reading The Sensational She-Hulk #1 which came out way back in 1989. He usually reads the adventures of Professor Charles Xaviers and his merry band of mutants, but he is partial to Jennifer Walters. The superheroine is flexing on her comic, flaunting her perfect hair while threatening the X-Men readers to finally give her story a shot. “Okay. This is your second chance. If you don’t buy my book this time, I’m gonna come to your house and rip up all your X-Men.” She grins. What can I say? She has a reputation for talking with her audiences.

Hey! See what I did there? I’m talking to you now. That’s cool, huh? Enough of being a peeping Tom to these poor kids. Let’s take a stroll in times of yonder. Yes, even before Matthew Broderick’s dashing turn in Ferris Bueller, or Mary Maclane’s 1918 movie ‘Men Who Made Love to Me’ where they address the audience directly. Roll the camera.

Let’s go all the way back to when stage plays and performing arts was the new cool. Let us imagine that stage, shall we? We know it has three walls, well sort of, as performers elicit the widest range of emotions ever conceivable in front of a live audience. There is a fourth wall too. It separates the performers from those watching them, completing a bubble of sorts, and in its entirety, completing the illusion that we buy into. Denis Diderot, a prominent figure in ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ is said to have conceived this wall, advocating its existence: With a fourth wall, performers can more closely imitate reality.

Denis Diderot by Louis-Michel van Loo (1767)

Every once in a while though, a character will address the audience directly, displaying a surprising sense of self-awareness. As if they know that the reality they are in is not real. That it exists for the purpose of entertainment or for creating meaningful art. It’s an illusion, suspension of disbelief, that the assemblage and the performers are collectively buying into. Media in general. So when a character chooses not to, we call that ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’. The simulacrum of the conceived barrier separating realities is shattered. It’s a tongue-in-cheek metaphor, I know, but the brilliance of this tool in the performing media, and now on celluloid and TVs exhibit exceptional savoir-faire.

It is not only a demarcator of the emergence of a renaissance in the naturalistic theatre, but it is also a break from dramatic conventions that dictate buying into the fake reality of the performance. While some may argue that the fourth wall did not even exist for the staging of the Bard of Avon’s plays, what with William Shakespeare’s love for soliloquies and monologues being directly spoken to the viewers, the art of breaking the fourth wall has expanded since and continues to do so. From comics to mockumentary-style television to video games to Ryan George’s hilarious Pitch Meetings on Youtube, it is a savvy tool used deftly by artists and creatives alike.

Some use it as a tool of comic effect, while some use it to make their characters more complex and dynamic. Some use it as a window into the world a character may inhabit, and to explain their motivation, while it has also been used to elicit sympathy or other emotions for a situation or a character. Alvy Singer, played with heart-breaking sincerity by Woody Allen in the brilliant movie ‘Annie Hall’ (1977) breaks the fourth wall several times. Allen said of that, “because I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them.” He managed to comfort us as well while at that.

My editor reminds me to mention that this technique exists in literature too! It’s called Metalepsis, the writer’s version of going meta. Be it John Fowles’ utterly brilliant “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Lemony Snicket’s well, everything (Dear Reader, there are people in the world who know no misery and woe…), or the deliciously ergodic and auto-referential, genre-hopping, paranoid masterpiece of Mark Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’, metalepsis itself, its influences in post-modern and experimental literature have been phenomenal.

Not to mention, ever since She-Hulk literally broke the fourth wall in her comics to have a word with her editor (something replicated unfortunately poorly in her MCU show), others started doing it too, most well-known among them being everyone’s favourite Merc-with-a-mouth, Deadpool. It is worth mentioning that characters like Dr. Fate, Squirrel Girl, Loki, and even Superman have been known to do the same in the comics on occasion.

Oh wait, I’m receiving some last-minute notes. Looks like that’s all the time we have today, folks! Imagine me winking through a loop of concentric circles, Looney Tunes style. Breaking the Fourth wall is a brilliant technique when used smartly, even sublime. So when the next time a character smiles at you through the camera, maybe smile back at them? Let them know you’re in on the secret.

You Can Not Put a Fire Out– I, Emily Dickinson’s Little Sister

By Nilay Bhatt

On 12/03/2023

In Authors

This piece is the second in a series of articles examining Emily Dickinson’s life, work, legacy, and enduring significance in poetry and popular culture. Read the first part here.

Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, or Vinnie, as she was fondly called, lived most of her life in the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born. Beautiful, loyal, curious, and vivacious, she devoted her time to housework and keeping the machine going. Of her, her niece, Martha Dickinson once wrote: “Upon her, very early, depended the real solidarity of the family”.

She had to, especially when her mother succumbed to grief after her father passed away in 1874. She never wed, and after her mother too had passed, she took care of her sister, Emily, a recluse who would one day make a name for herself in the world and leave behind a rich and enduring legacy of the Dickinson name.

Vinnie’s sister would one day rise up to become one of the most celebrated poets and one of the most exceptional minds of English literature. Emily Dickinson would one day take over the world with her words, even though she would not herself be around to see it. But it is a little-known fact, that the genius of Emily Dickinson might have not seen the light of day when it did, or at all, had it not been for sweet Vinnie.

An Extraordinary Poet & (not) a Recluse

While Vinnie devotedly cooked and cleaned and kept the Homestead in order, her older sister Emily sat at her desk in her room and scribbled furiously as ideas poured out of her head in the form of exquisite poetry. While many misconstrue her as The Woman in White or a lonely woman, she had lived a full life.

She had correspondences with writers and poets, and a network of friends and family who supported her and loved her. She shared a special love with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, wife to Austin Dickinson, who lived in the neighboring house, the Evergreens.

In one of her letters, she writes,

“To own a Susan of my own

Is of itself a Bliss –

Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,

Continue me in this!”

Emily wrote even when her eyes became weak and even when poor health grappled her sweet soul. Living a blissful solitary existence in her homestead, Emily wrote and she wrote until her fingers burned. In her last few years, she would rarely go out. Beset with a great number of personal tragedies and losses, and in helping Vinnie share the load of housework, her writing seemed to get more disorganized and frantic. She no longer collated her poetry in her booklets. She wrote on bits of paper, and she wrote on scraps, in a haste unlike any. She wrote until her health failed.

Emily Dickinson Poem — Transcription of Emily Dickinson’s “Immortal is an ample word” (1886-96)

Before passing in the May of 1886 after more than two years of ill health, she requested Vinnie to burn her letters and correspondences.

The Chance Discovery of a Genius

Vinnie stood alone in the home she had known all her life, all alone, grieving for the loss of her sister who she had loved and protected all her life. She burned the letters and tried to make sense of the acute loss she had suffered in recent years. That is when she found them.

Now, Emily had been published before, anonymously and not, but not much of her work had reached beyond a certain few circles. Vinnie found hundreds of her sister’s poems, most of which were not read by eyes any other than Emily’s own. Her late sister had left no instructions as to what fate she wished for her words.

Vinnie took a decision. Her sister’s words would be published. The sheer brilliance of her work deserved its chance in the sun. Vinnie loved her sister. Within the next few years, Vinnie made all efforts conceivable to publish Emily’s work. She wasted no time in collecting her works and making sense of hundreds of scraps of paper her sister had left behind. She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a revolutionary abolitionist, writer, and women’s rights movement supporter, Emily’s dear friend, frequent correspondent, and one of her staunchest supporters, in 1890: “I have had a ‘Joan of Arc’ feeling about Emilies poems from the first.”

Due to her efforts, Higginson, who co-edited the first publication, and Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of an Amherst College professor and a celebrated artist, Poems of Emily Dickinson (the first series) was put to print in 1890, four years after the author had passed away.

Poems by Emily Dickinson — Poetry by Emily Dickinson (1890)

Vinnie’s chest swelled with pride and she stood with her brother and Susan, her nephew and nieces, and Higginson and Todd. Poems though, did not even collect a small fraction of the material Emily had written over her lifetime. There was much work to be done. All of Dickinson’s work would not be collated until 1955, several editions later, when Thomas H. Johnson, a literary scholar would compile it all and edit the original manuscripts to publish The Poems of Emily Dickinson long after Vinnie and Higginson and Todd had all passed away. For now, tears streamed out of Vinnie’s determined eyes and she sat on the bed her sister slept on in the room her sister never left with a copy of Poems in her hand. This wasn’t the beginning, but it was a beginning. Emily Dickinson was well known enough in the town of Amherst, but soon, the entire world would know her sister’s name.

Cricket, a Metaphor for Sri Lanka: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka

By Amritesh Mukherjee

On 10/03/2023

In Book Reviews

The love affair between cricket and this reader began early on. The roots were watered and tended to by a father who loved few things as much as he loved the sport. Victories in anything, you see, are tiny miracles that have fate, talent, and timing conspiring together to make something extraordinary. It was one such night of victory that I, the reader, fell in love with the sport, a certain final that India won.

But there was an older love affair the reader has had, one with the quiet books in a library, and the colorful comics in a bookstall. And naturally, he wanted something more. He long desired to read a cricket novel where cricket is not some subplot relegated to the corners like some frivolous tea party you wouldn’t really mind missing out on. He wanted to read something that gave the same thrill as reading the live commentary of a game hanging on the threads of fate. He wanted something extraordinary. He wanted a victory, one that he found in the pages of this book.

Indian players celebrating the t20 World Cup win — Credit: AFP via Getty Images

And when Karunatilaka describes the finale between Sri Lanka and Australia in the 1996-97 World Cup, he felt the same euphoric thrill that makes you love life a bit more, the kind of thrill that gives you second thoughts about the impossibility of what you experienced right now.

Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air.
shehan karunatilaka, chinaman: The legend of pradeep mathew

Why the Need for a Cricket Novel?

Cricket in literature isn’t a new phenomenon. Not quite common, sure, but not new either. What’s been lacking, however, and something a cricket lover can’t help but desire too, is the sport being a critical part of the overarching narrative, the Atlas to bear the weight of the globe if you may. This particular lacking is generously compensated through this vivacious, sprawling piece of literature.

But why this desire in the first place, one might wonder? Is cricket as important as politics or societal hierarchies or interpersonal relationships or one’s identity? Arguably yes. Sometimes even more.

Sports can unite worlds, tear down walls and transcend race, the past, and all probability. Unlike life, sport matters.
shehan karunatilaka, chinaman: the legend of pradeep mathew

Onto the Story…

It’s the story of an aging sports writer, Karunasena, to seek out a mysterious spinner who is, for all practical purposes, dead. There are no records of him, no trail to find where he might be now, nothing. All that exists is memory. Memory of watching him bowl some of the greatest spells in the history of cricket. It’s this chasing the invisible that forms the center of this mad frenzy of a novel.

But the story is also Karunasena’s. It’s his flaws, his addiction to alcohol, his philosophy that switches from nihilism to optimism in the blink of an eye, his commentary on those around him, his obsession with the sport he devoted his life to, and most of all, his humane unreliability that makes this novel what it is.

If all this is scaring you, don’t worry, for even if you’re someone new to the world of cricket and only thinks the word to mean that little chirpy insect, you wouldn’t be lost here. While you’ll certainly enjoy Karunasena’s ramblings more if you’re a lover of the sport, Shehan keeps an eye out for the newbies to the game as well.

Credit: Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka

In a section at the very beginning of the novel, rather wittily titled “Sales Pitch”, he goes so far as to say that if you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you. Apt.

The Birth of a Cricketing Nation

All of this is well and nice, but what truly makes this novel a chef-d’œuvre in the world of cricket literature is the parallel metaphor of Sri Lanka.

It’s a country that’s faced one adversity after another. To then equate the Sri Lankan cricket team to the country they represent, to extrapolate the struggles within the cricketing world to give a commentary on the racial and caste divides that permeate the country, is nothing short of genius. It’s a country you’d be hard pressed to dismiss like some stray pebble on a rocky terrain, and yet it’s a country that would surprise you time and time again.

But the metaphors for Sri Lanka don’t stop there. Oh no, not even close! This is something you’ll notice often in Shehan’s stories. Even when Sri Lanka is not the opening batsman, it’s always there in the stadium, if only as a viewer. And, in a way, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is, in a way, the legend of Sri Lanka too.

Like the elusive mystery spinner (I wonder if that description harks back to the supposed mythical greatness Lankan politicians have often talked about in the past), the country too has lofty ambitions but is often stuck up in conflicts within itself. Like Pradeep, the country has a lot of promise and talent, but due to numerous factors, it never quite reached all the places it could’ve gone. Like him, the nation has a diverse ethnic background, something that has painted the country red too often. And yet, like him, the country has survived, persevered in the face of impossible conditions.

A Cricket Autobiography

Outside of Chinaman, every other book on cricket adorning my shelves is non-fictional, most of them autobiographical. Biographies are to cricket what awards are to movies, there are simply too many of them. Keeping this in mind, it’s hard not to wonder if Shehan’s work in an indirect ode to the numerous biographies that have been written over the years. After all, from the first-person narration to photographs and sketches that populate the pages of this book, it would come across as an autobiography to someone just glancing through its pages.

It’s not just a stylistic choice, however. It serves to lend the book an air of authenticity, what with the narrative mired with real events and characters, that’s hard to shake off. You’re not reading yet another fictional narrative, you’re reading the history and life of a nation and its people. And all of that: it’s very much real. Therefore, by appealing to a sense of factuality in us, Shehan adds more life, more reality into his already phenomenal work.

Wrapping Up…

Coming back to the age-old question, why should you read this text clocking over 500 pages? Let’s try and give a pointless answer to this pointless question, shall we?

You love politics? Read this book.

You find intergenerational conflicts interesting? Read this book.

You find the unreliability of fictional narratives compelling? Read this book.

You want to know more about Sri Lanka (and its literature)? Read this book.

You enjoy cricket (the sport, not the insect)? Read. This. Book.

I rest my case.

You Left Me, Sire: Two Legacies- A Feather Falls on Emily Dickinson’s Grave

By Nilay Bhatt

On 02/03/2023

In Authors

This piece is the first in a series of articles examining Emily Dickinson’s life, work, legacy, and enduring significance in poetry and popular culture. Read the next part here.

Emily Dickinson thought of death quite a bit. She wrote of it extensively too, with poems like “Because I could not stop for Death”, “I felt a funeral in my brain”, and “A coffin is a small domain”. Her words are punctuated by short phrases, idiosyncratic vocabulary, metaleptic punctuation, and vivid imagery, and her work is transcendental, of immense wit and intellect, capturing the zeitgeist of being a woman in the nineteenth century. Despite her ruminations on god, the nature of immortality and death, and ponderings on spirit and mind, she wrote with a refreshing verve and insight. Her words are a source of comfort today.

1.

Transcription of Emily Dickinson’s “A coffin is a small domain” (1886-96)

“A Coffin — is a small Domain,
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane.”

The trees of the West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts sigh languidly on a lazy summer day as a gust of wind blows through their leaves. A feather rode the tides of the wind and swam through the air. The summertime haze lifted in the cemetery on Triangle Street and quickly, the feather frolicked its way through the gravestones and the trees. The day was strangely alive and the cemetery was occupied by a bunch of visitors across the 4-acre plot.

An iron fence separates some graves from the rest around which a throng of people stood. Miraculously, the feather swam above their heads, and just as sudden as the gust that had lifted it up originally, the wind died. The feather fell with a soft moan near the marble slab that was cool to touch in the balmy breeze, soft like a kiss. On it was engraved: “Emily Dickinson. Dec. 10, 1830. Called Back. May 15, 1886.”

The ground has memories, the soil remembers. May 19, 1886. It remembers the small funeral procession in the Dickinson Homestead. It remembers how the procession started at the parlor of the Homestead, then circled the poet’s flower garden and as per her own instructions, went through the house barn and through a grassy path lined with buttercups to the cemetery on Triangle Street. It remembers the beautiful white coffin and it remembers a grave lined with evergreen boughs laid by a loving heart and a trembling hand by Susan Gilbert Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson had breathed her last.

Flaming June by Frederic Lord Leighton (1895)

A small, yet intimate gallery of personas had gathered, who had loved this woman or seen her grow up. Austin and Susan Dickinson, her brother and sister-in-law held each other in their arms and watched her being lowered into the grave to begin the next great journey of existence. Susan would later write her obituary in The Springfield Republican, “A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see”.

2.

“A Grave — is a restricted Breadth —
Yet ampler than the Sun —
And all the Seas He populates
And Lands He looks upon”

Lavinia Dickinson, the youngest sibling, sat upright beside them, shaking. She had no inkling of the idea that she would find a vault of thousands of poems by her late sister later. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily’s close friend and a fierce champion of her poetry was somber. He could not get the face of his friend out of his mind, sneaking a glance before they closed the coffin. He had read Emily Bronte’s poem, “No Coward Soul is Mine” at the service and smiled when he saw her lay peacefully in white clothes as if she slept.

He remembered the first words he ever read from her in a letter, “MR. HIGGINSON, — Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” It felt like that had been ages ago. He would later write, “E.D.’s face a wondrous restoration of youth – she is 54 [55] & looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle, & perfect peace on the beautiful brow. There was a little bunch of violets at the neck & one pink cypripedium; the sister Vinnie put in two heliotropes by her hand ‘to take to Judge Lord’.”

After Emily Dickinson was lowered into her eternal resting place in the earth’s loving embrace, a gravestone was erected with her initials, E.E.D. Years later, her niece, Martha Dickinson would change it to the white marble stone etched with the title of the Hugh Conway novel (“Called Back”), which still stands today.

3.

Vanitas Still-Life by Harmen Steenwijck (1640)

“There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.”

Emily Dickinson was a poet, a supposed recluse, an untethered free spirit. The woman in white. She wrote of immortality and legacy and hope, and yes, death. She wrote of funeral possessions and wild nights and bees and devotion. She was a revolutionary, a woman ahead of her own time, who wrote of her fears, aspirations, and beliefs with brazen honesty. Above everything else, she was loved.

She is laid to rest now in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she had lived all her life, with the rest of her family. Her words stay alive though, now more than ever. She did not see her words read by many before she passed, but her legacy endures.

Her life may have been short, but her words are eternal.

Acknowledgement: Each sub-section of this article begins with a verse from Emily Dickinson’s poem, “A Coffin is a Small Domain.”

Why Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles is Queerphobic, Heteronormative, Misogynistic, Regressive, Problematic, and a Disservice to The Iliad

By Amritesh Mukherjee

On 02/03/2023

In Book Reviews

Song of Achilles, the beloved “retelling” of Greek mythology or more specifically Homer’s Iliad, and the seemingly modern take on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is not what it seems. If you’re one of those who are yet to travel through its pages, let this piece serve as a warning (?). Okay, so, where shall we begin? Do I begin talking about how the original myths are more modern than anything that Miller writes here or do we look at the heteronormative themes present everywhere, or do we talk about the gorgeous irrationality that drips through these pages?

Let me make something clear right away. This is not an attack on Miller as a writer (or maybe it is?). I quite enjoyed reading Circe (the author has since changed their mind; Circe, too, was an abomination), a book that stays true to the original myths while adding a new perspective of its own, something I believe is the very purpose of a retelling. However, when it comes to Song of Achilles, tsk tsk tsk.

The Death of Patroclus

The Patroclus in Miller’s story is a direct contrast to the warrior in the pages of the Greek myths. This is Patroclus we’re talking about. The same Patroclus who had a higher death count than most of his counterparts. The same Patroclus who goes through the Trojan army like nothing. The same Patroclus who has to be stopped by a god (freaking Apollo himself!) because he decided to scale the walls of Troy by himself.

Come Miller’s Patroclus and he’s almost like a loyal follower of Achilles. He’ll follow him wherever he goes, and battlefields are a strict no-no. By changing this very basic fact about Patroclus, Miller changes everything about him. Retellings are supposed to change some elements, but here it’s almost as if she kills Patroclus and blabbers about some dead zombie (serving a socio-political agenda).

But Amritesh, I hear you ask, isn’t she changing the idea of what a hero can be? That a hero can be someone existing outside the stereotypes of masculinity?

Dear oh dear, you’ve got no clue, do you?

The Death of Rationality

I did not kill anyone, or even attempt to. At the end of the morning, hours and hours of nauseating chaos, my eyes were sun blind, and my hand ached with gripping my spear—though I had used it more often to lean on than threaten. My helmet was a boulder crushing my ears slowly into my skull.

It felt like I had run for miles, though when I looked down I saw that my feet had beaten the same circle over and over again, flattening the same dry grass as if preparing a dancing field. Constant terror had siphoned and drained me, even though somehow I always seemed to be in a lull, a strange pocket of emptiness into which no men came, and I was never threatened.
song of achilles, chapter twenty-two

This scene is set right in the middle of a battle. A live, actual battle. Even if we close our eyes and manage to ignore the way she reduces Patroclus to this pittance and how it’s disingenuous to the character yada yada, there remains another issue. It just does not make sense. At all. A soldier standing and dancing around on a battlefield? What is this, the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

And for the sake of justifying her “version” of Patroclus, Miller would cross seas and fight dolphins if she has to. She’ll change Iliad, she’ll change how these epic stories unfold, she’ll change what the characters represent and symbolize, she’ll murder nuance, and she’ll do other unspeakable literary atrocities too scandalous to deserve a mention here.

If I had to read stupidity, the masterpiece that is Fifty Shades of Grey is always out there. Why bother reading a Greek retelling?

But wait, there’s more. The climactic scene sees Patroclus crusading through the Trojan army by fluke. No, I didn’t make a mistake there. A guy who can’t fight, who’s always avoided battlefields breaks through the mighty Trojan army by fluke. It just happens. Somehow. Magically. Make it make sense to me, someone?

Heteronormativity: A Common Occurrence in Popular Gay Fiction

Achilles tending to Patroclus by Sosias (500 BC) CCA-ArchaiOptix

Heteronormativity in a relationship can be broadly referred to as partners exhibiting different behavior. It’s the popular seme-uke dynamic all over again, wherein a partner is dominant and the leader (seme) and the other is submissive and simply follows the other (uke). This aligns with the commonly asked (and homophobic) question: What are you, a top or a bottom?

Why is this problematic? It’s an attempt at converting homosexual and queer relationships into quasi-heterosexual ones. As if everything makes sense only when they exist in binaries, in extremities, in blacks and whites. Which is, I’m very sorry to say, not how the world functions. And certainly not queer relationships.

This doesn’t just end with this book, unfortunately. Almost like an extension of the popular straight man’s fantasy of watching two lesbians kiss and fuck, there’s a rise in “gay romance novels” by straight women in the market. As if the best friend trope wasn’t humiliating enough, now the authors want to use them to enact their personal fantasies on the page. Never for a second think that these books were written for queer audiences, for the target audience remains, by and large, straight women. This isn’t representation, this isn’t making things better, but only preserving the pre-existing dynamics. Miller’s book further adds to that.

Coming back to our book, the beauty of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in The Iliad is that they have an equal dynamic. Consider Achilles on one hand. The greatest warrior, a demigod, a hero, second to none. The Aristos Achaion. On the other hand is Patroclus, born to mere mortals, yet no less than Achilles on the battlefield. The man who single-handedly inspired the defeated and demoralized Achean army to battle again.

To take this equal dynamic and reduce it to whatever it is that exists in the Song of Achilles in order to make everything more palatable to audiences (or perhaps Miller herself?) is as regressive as they go. She goes so far in her process of creating this quasi-heterosexual relationship that Achilles barely shows any reaction to Patroclus’ death here. When in The Iliad, he cried with such intensity and for such a length that his mother had to come scampering to find out what was going on.

At this point, you might ask, but hey, doesn’t she make their close friendship a homoerotic one? Isn’t that a somewhat modern take on their story? Ummmmm…

Queerphobia, Regressivity, and Whitewashing

Someone not very familiar with Greek mythology might think that homosexuality wasn’t prevalent or observed in public spheres in those times. Barely so. While it wasn’t outright celebrated, the sexual and romantic dynamics used to be more ambiguous and complex than a lot of purveyors would have you believe.

And here’s where queerphobia creeps into Miller’s story. Instead of both Achilles and Patroclus having relationships with other women while also having a relationship with each other, effectively insinuating that they’re not “pure gays”, she creates this relationship that fits the Victorian idea of how a relationship ought to be. Taking something complex and nuanced and layered and turning it into something narrow and linear?

Part of what makes the story of Achilles and Patroclus so fascinating to historians and literary enthusiasts over the years is how it subverts expectations and categorization. This was a relationship that completely flipped the idea of how a homosexual relationship ought to be.

Someone remind me why this one’s considered to be a modern retelling, again?

The matter of her trying to fit our dear protagonists into her Victorian moralities is present in repeated incidences. Achilles doesn’t sleep with women, of course, because he’s such a noble at heart and because you can only love one person at one time. He might be arrogant and can dream of glory in all its vanity, but sexual infidelity? That’s where the lines must be drawn, sire. To fit these characters into this worldview, she alters the characters and the relationships of/with Briseis and Deidameia as well. To dump away these wonderful, complex characters away in order to enforce these traditional and regressive tropes over and over again: whitewashing in all its glory!

Look, part of what makes Achilles so compelling a character are his flaws. He’s a deeply flawed character in The Iliad, someone who decided to skip a war because a woman he “won” was taken away from him, someone whose anger knows no bounds. Not his charisma, not his bravery, not his strength, as this book will have you believe.

The Greek world of The Iliad is a far cry from a just and equal society in a lot of things. From societal injustices ranging from social and economic equality to the prevalence of patriarchy, there’s much that can be played with there. But the perspective that Miller tries to change here, it’s already more advanced and nuanced than her book can ever strive to be.

Thetis

You’d think all this would be enough. But no, what’s a story without some good old misogyny? If only she got satisfied after ruining the protagonists, it might be a tolerable book. But no, she makes sure she butchers everyone in the worst possible way. And when I say worst, I mean the worst possible way out there.

We’ll only look at Thetis here, for the sake of brevity. This is a woman who was raped by the person she was later forced to marry, by the gods. Oh, and the same person would keep on raping her for the rest of the next year. Let’s see what’s Miller got to say about the two of them:

An ordinary wife would have counted herself lucky to find a husband with Peleus’ mildness, his smile-lined face. But for the sea-nymph Thetis nothing could ever eclipse the stain of his dirty, mortal mediocrity.
song of achilles, chapter three

Yep.

Mind you, Thetis is one of the best characters (although a minor one) in The Iliad, a woman who was raped over and over and who left her husband at the first chance she got, yet a woman who loved her son madly and would go to any lengths to protect him (the legend of Thetis dipping Achilles in the river Styx to make him immortal is one of the most popular non-Homerian Greek stories), a woman who comes forth to aid Achilles over and over again during the Trojan war.

Thetis dipping the infant Achilles into the river Styx by Peter Paul Rubens (1630)

Miller transforms that woman into an evil, scheming, manipulative mother who can’t see Achilles happy. Her treatment of this character is hollow and cruel and even manages to outshine her butchering of Patroclus somehow. It’s misogynistic, and patriarchal, and makes you think if her sole intention behind this was to create the evil parent trope so common in heterosexual romances.

A Disservice to The Iliad

I pity those whose only contact with the Greek myths is this book. Not only does it sanitize and force a certain outlook on its readers, but it does injustice to, what essentially is, an artifact of history. Because, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, that’s what great literature is. A historical artifact, that gives a glimpse into a world gone by, like nothing else.

It’s a book that ditches all character growth and complexity for the sake of yet another heteronormative romance novel. It forsakes all the intricacy and beauty of the original myths, creating a regressive and bland story in the process. There are no two ways about the fact that the Song of Achilles is an absolute disservice to The Iliad.

To conclude…

It’s a book that rehashes and changes every single thing good about The Iliad and if that wasn’t enough, those very “changes” are hailed as “modern” to top it all off. If this is modernity, someone please throw me to the dark ages please.

Kick Up at a Hazard Table by Thomas Rowlandson (1787)

Why Do Good?: A Guide for Times When It’s Not Easy to Give a Shit

By Nilay Bhatt

On 01/03/2023

In Essays

When you turn on your television to sift through the evening news after sitting on the couch with a glass of chardonnay which you have convinced yourself will be the only one tonight (because you need to ‘decompress’), you cannot help but sigh as you sink deep into the couch: “The world is on fire and it is only getting worse.”

This could easily have been a manifesto on why that is a loaded statement or how it would be better for everyone involved if you keep the bottle of chardonnay out of your arm’s reach. Though the sentiment is not erroneous either. There is so much absurdity happening all over the globe
with much of it providing a reasonable explanation for despair, ethical quandaries, and mental disorders that plague an entire generation.

Trauma has become generational, and each younger generation is inheriting a borrowed world where there seems to be a constant and consistent erosion of authentic values and morals. Of course, one can also argue the essentiality of the doctrines of relativism on ‘no absolute truth’, which emphatically suggest that the power vested in perceiving something in relation to another and proclaiming it right or wrong is firmly rooted in the context attributed to it and influenced by motivators of convictions, conventions, and abstraction from a form of a vantage point.

You might feel that society is on a decline and there are tidings of it getting much worse. Or perhaps you are tired and blue because even if you try to remain a good person, you have experiences every day that make you lose faith in humanity. Maybe you do not see any merit in trying because nobody else seems to care about it.

It is also conceivable that you do not feel that there is any meaning to the life or existence of a deity and you do not have the religious crutch of fear-mongering to force you into acts of conceived selflessness. Chances are you are just sick of it all and each passing day edges you firmly into an attitude of dismissal. It has become difficult to care.

Why do good then? Why be a good person? Why bother to attempt goodness when there is no scoring system in place that rewards you for it? Why make the effort in the face of convenience and blissful ignorance? An answer to that, if this writer be so bold to eschew is that for better or worse, “We live in a society.”, and that perhaps should promulgate an attitude simpler to understand than “It is the right thing to do.”

As the popular saying goes, you can take a horse to the lake but you cannot make it drink water. Contrary to what is propagated in several forms of media these days, there is some merit in thinking that a person will be a good person, and actively care about being good when they want to be good, rather than them being told they should be good. We are a species of everlasting wonder that way. And it is difficult to care when you are
disillusioned.

A contractualist point of view is eschewed by T. M. Scanlon in his book What We Owe Each Other, a fascinating exploration of morality, ethics, and how they are justifiable while giving strong arguments to the titular aphorism. Scanlon believes in the plurality of moral and non-moral values. His theories suggest that the fairness of a moral decision and motives can be well understood by a system of mutual justification and criticism. Simply put, if what you do is justifiable to all the others involved, right or wrong, it should not be an issue.

So how does it all come together then? We live in a world full of diversity in its human populace in all ways conceivable. Some of us are misanthropes, some religious. Some anarchists or liberals or fascists or socialists. Some have no time to formulate an opinion and some cannot resist making one. The differences in our basic biology to the differences in our upbringings. There are more distinguishers and demarcations than this writer can mention, and yet there is still a common denominator that threads every single one of us into a group. The human condition. We are all in this together, this condition of existence.

And the simple fact of the matter is, all of it becomes so much easier to bear when you try to be good. Because as a species of carbon-based bipedalists evolutionarily gifted with intelligence, it is what we owe to each other. A discussion of what constitutes moral or not proves an interesting leeway for many of us to skirt responsibility, an attitude that has been on a rise for the last couple of decades. It has allowed us to bring up walls of comfort around our lives and stay ignorant of the realities of how our actions affect those around us because they do.

While a more robust discussion of the merits and demerits of relativism and contractualism is beyond the scope of this article, it is the hope of this writer that whatever your stance is on morality and responsibility in society, you see the need for more kindness in this world. The human condition unites us, and with a system of mutual goodness, it instills some meaning into the mundane, making life bearable. A little empathy goes a long way. A random act of kindness might just bring a smile to somebody’s face.

A character in The Good Place, a show that captures the zeitgeist of this chief philosophy and one of the finest pieces of media to emerge in this century makes a very valid point about the same (it has an entire episode dedicated to themes of Scanlon’s book too!): “I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”

The Good Place Season 1 Episode 6 Screenshot — The Good Place S1E06

Being good is not about being a goody-two-shoes or that annoying positive character in sitcoms who’s happy even when the world is falling apart around them (though do you really envy that?). Being good is not about being perfect. We might have the best intentions, and the relativists among you might just smile here, but we might still end up making a mess.

We are a flawed species, something that makes us even more endearing, along with the fact that we are capable of accomplishing unimaginable wonders when we actually do make an effort. Especially when there are more reasons not to.

Being good is about giving a shit. Might be a far reach or a coping mechanism, but being good, and spreading kindness? That might just make the pains of existence sweeter.