Life-en-treats

I liked the book The Namesake a lot. For one, its sentences flow uninterruptedly like a river and secondly, the choices the author Jhumpa Lahiri makes are very interesting. See for example, the reason why Gogol and Maxie break up, it follows the death of Ashoke. Death is something that's handled differently in different cultures. The seriousness or the way in which we deal with this really does mar or make existing relationships. Even people belonging to the same culture are shaken up by death. I like even better the bit where Gogol's wife suddenly on their anniversary dinner feels let down that the restaurant owners are closing down even before they finish eating. Things take on a starker hue for Gogol's wife leading finally to a break up and the ways in which these were represented through a perception of mundane things in the world thoroughly fascinated me. I thought Kal Penn was bad in the film the first time I watched it, and liked him the second time I watched t

Awadheshwari . By Shankar Mokashi Punekar. Trans. P P Giridhar. 2006. Bangalore: Sahitya Akademi. 408 pages. In times when tradition and modernity persist as crucial issues in all of our scholarship in literature as well as the social sciences, the translation of Shankar Mokashi Punekar’s Awadheshwari , by P P Giridhar is an apt venture. The novel is a creative take on the political life in Vedic times. Written in 1987, the novel won itself a Sahitya Akademi Award. For all of us now, such a novel and its translation into English rakes up a series of questions. How can one reconstruct the Vedic times? What are resources available to do so to creative writers? How does a reconstruction of the Vedic times in the 1980s look like, would it look any different or similar now? How would a translation of Vedic times, so to say, into English look like? Does the translation of Vedic times involve a translation of concepts of the life-world of a certain time-space or does it demand a reconfigurin

Diane Richardson, Rethinking Sexuality . London , Thousand Oaks , New Delhi : Sage Publications, 2000. 176+ix pages. 18.99pounds. This book in detail scans through almost all the debates that feminism, queer theory and citizenship have had in relation to sexuality. The originality of the book lies in its stringing together of various strands from feminism, citizenship and theories of sexuality. The aim as is stated in the book is to examine the new ways of understanding sexuality and ‘sexual politics’ that are emerging, through a critical awareness of some of the major theoretical and political debates in the last thirty years. The book focuses on the rethinking of sexuality around the three themes of heterosexuality, citizenship and AIDS. Rethinking sexuality, as the book is well aware, is a larger project than the focus one gets here. The purpose of examining citizenship and AIDS language though not made clear, the relationship between feminism and queer theory is a concern well brou

Prof N Manu Chakravarthy is professor of English at the NMKRV College for Women in Bangalore . Author of two books in Kannada, Bharatiya Streevaada and Bahumukha , his other work is Conversations and Cultural Reflections . He has written over 70 articles and regularly writes for leading Newspapers and Journals. He writes for the Deep Focus, a film quarterly. Some of my first classes in cultural studies were with N Manu Chakravarthy, and the charisma remains. Sitting at the canteen table, gulping the aroma of masala dosa and coffee, this interview/chat happened. Manu is a scholar who holds some remarkable positions, so this interview had to exploit the opportunity fully, in fact films was one last thing we forced ourselves into. Questions are from all over the place and for those who can make the connection (of socio-political issues on films), I am sure, this will be something of value. How would you respond to the recent moves (return of popular…etc) towards mainstream/popular/Com

Banjegere Jayaprakash's essay (now brought out as a book, published earlier in the Agni magazine) 'aanudEva horagaNavanu', an inquiry into Basavanna's jaati caused great controversy and debate in Karnataka, India. The author claims that Basavanna, (the 12th century figure mostly anachronistically understood as a social reformer) was in fact a maadiga and not a brahmin, as textbook history and commonly held, 'established truth' has had it for sometime now. Really, it is a claim, for there is no justification or basis provided in the book to prove that Basavanna is a maadiga. In fact, there is no basis in any of the archives to prove that Basava was a maadiga. But Banjegere would not know this, since his work is not historical at all. Throughout the book, however, he insists that different theoretical presuppositions will yield different shasanas ('facts'). As if, the shasanas exist to tell us the stories we would like to hear! As if history is out there

Recently, my Paati passed away. When my mother reached their house, the doctor said that out of the four beats of the heart, there was one. One feeble heartbeat was still there! My Paati had refused to go to the hospital. An act that accepts death as inevitable, that refuses lifestyle changes of the kind imposed by an extended hospital-stay. My Paati brought up four children all alone. She lost her husband when very young. She worked hard. Her life is an example of strength and courage. She had a love for the good things of life and always enjoyed them to the fullest. I have saved plants that had lost leaves and were on the verge of dying. Its strange that life is talked about as something that leaves and regains. 'Matte jeeva tumbikoluttade' one would say of plants in Kannada. Wonder what revives them!