To Whomsoever It May Concern

This is to inform the readers (if any) of this blog that none of the posts on it are about any individual.

If you have been reading this blog, you would know that the one thing it is about is the individual’s place in and relation with the society. And the stand on this topic that comes up again and again in the posts on this blog (never literally, except here, but otherwise in all ways) is the individual’s right to be left in peace if that individual is not doing anything atrocious against the society or other individuals. Note that I don’t mean even this seemingly clear statement of the stand to be taken very literally. But you can understand it if you want to.

I simply don’t write about individuals, except if they are public figures and even then only about their public statements and actions.

But I do write about the society, the institution (the general, abstract institution) and the system. And, of course, there are people who are parts of these (as I am too). In that sense I do write about the individual in his or her role as a member of one of these.

Also, this is a literary (and occasionally academic) blog, not a blog about, say, my daily activities. There are essays and poems on this blog. Even one story. So I would be offended if you insist on calling them mere posts, as would be any person who writes (literary) poems.

A poem is a poem is a poem, even if it appears on a blog, technically as a post. So is an essay. So is a story.

How good they are may be a matter of debate.

Yes, my personal experiences may act as catalysts for my writings, but isn’t that true of every writer worth his salt?

Who’s Afraid of Arundhati Roy?

[This is an extended version of a comment posted on the Outlook magazine website in response to an article by Reeta Sinha.]

I couldn’t really understand what exactly is your point (if any). I do get it that you are enraged by the attention that Arundhati Roy is getting (through her ‘attention grabbing devices’). That’s fine with me. It’s true that she is getting a disproportionate amount of attention, just as her ‘one-book-wonder’ has earned a disproportionate amount of money.

Apart from that, I don’t understand what objections you have which made you write such a long piece on a non-issue. Are you objecting to some particular stand taken by her? To some particular protest she has been involved in?

Or are you just saying that all that she has been arguing for is wrong and that all her ’causes’ are unworthy of support? Or that the causes may be alright but her arguments are wrong?

Frankly, I am not able to get any clue about the answers to these questions from your lengthy tirade against Arundhati Roy, the celebrity.

Do you actually have any stand about any of those causes? Or do you believe they should be left to the experts?

I will tell you my opinion. Of course, what she is saying is not very original in terms of the content. It’s not meant to be original. The purpose of (explicitly) political writing is not to be original, but to effectively argue about some cause or some issue or even about the world in general. Effectively enough for people to pay attention. This means originality in terms of style, at least.

Now, even though you seem to be enraged by the attention she is getting (people interviewing her about herself), you seem to be suggesting that people are actually not paying attention to her, i.e., to what she is saying about the causes and the issues. Is that really so? I don’t think so. Yes, more people are paying attention to the members of the RSS family than to her. In fact, more people are paying attention to Narendra Modi than to her, but then the very nature of what she talks about is such that no one usually wants to listen to those things. Because it can make you uncomfortable and disturbed. It can even shake your very foundations, brainwashed as you may be by the whole system of manufactured consent.

Those people in Nepal who have been brought up on the culture of devotion to the King are still not able to accept the fact that monarchy is a bad idea. Devotion to the monarchy may be at the root of their philosophy of life. They are not going to be convinced easily. Perhaps some will never be. Till they die. But their children (or grandchildren) will have no problem in getting convinced.

So, even if, in absolute terms, not many may be paying attention to her political writing, in relative terms, a large number of people are paying attention to her. And people are not just paying attention to *her*, they are actually paying attention to the causes she is talking about. She has managed to convince some people. Not you, perhaps, but some people. And you may not think so, but a very large number of activists, including those who are scholars of the highest repute and the highest order, do believe that her arguments are convincing and persuasive. You are entitled to your opinion, but then so am I. And so are those who agree with her. And by any standards, the quality of people who agree with her is, on the whole, much higher than those who don’t. You can find the details about this claim if you do your own research (without leaving it to an expert) on her, and on the people I am talking about.

And also about the problems she is talking about.

Why don’t you take your own advice? Ignore the person and focus on the cause. That is, if you think there is a cause. I could have said more about this had you shown any interest in any cause while writing your piece and given some indication of where you stand. For example, what is your position on the War on Terror? Or on the Big Dams? Or on nuclear weapons? Or on Fascism? Or on globalization? Or on Salva Judum? The only hint I can get from your article is that you don’t think any of these issues are important enough for anyone to ’shout from the rooftop’, as Arundhati Roy described her attempts. Like so many others, you perhaps don’t mind people shouting from the rooftop about safe issues (or non-issues), which doesn’t shake anyone’s foundations.

To make clear why I am writing this, I will repeat again. Ignore the person if you don’t like her talking about herself. Instead focus on the issue or the cause. It is possible, you know.

To me, it doesn’t matter much whether she likes being called an activist or not. Or a writer-activist or not, for that matter. To me, what matters is whether what she is saying about the Big Dams or about corporatization (in the name of globalization) or about Fascism has any validity or not.

Yes, she does get hyperbolic sometimes, but then no one is perfect.

You can avoid hyperbole completely by being a loyal obedient orderly, for example. But I would have no respect for her if she followed this course.

I prefer Kabir (who did use hyperboles quite a lot) to Birbal or Tenali Rama (who also used hyperboles, but in a very safe way).

I like Ramachandra Guha’s writings, but I like P. Sainath’s writings more. But some might say that Sainath also gets hyperbolic. Some might even say that he is glorifying suicides. I know what is the problem with such people.

Literary writing, fictional or non-fictional, explicitly political or implicitly political (there is no such thing as non-political), is not (fortunately) dictated by what teachers of English composition say.

Ever heard of James Joyce? Samuel Beckett? Kafka? Gabriel Garcia Marques? Salman Rushdie?

Pablo Neruda? He was a big celebrity too.

Shakespeare? He is so full of attention grabbing devices. And all his devices have been adopted into the English language. Did your English composition teacher tell you this?

Arrogance! Arrogance!

What about ignorance?

More importantly, what about willful ignorance?

A Tryst with the Soul of Paris (1)

As I promised, I am going to write about the movie ‘La Môme’, also known as ‘La Vie en Rose’ (‘The Life in the Pink’). The movie is about the legendary French popular singer Édith Piaf, real name Édith Giovanna Gassion, but earlier known as La Môme Piaf (The Little Sparrow).

For the last many weeks, I have been soaking myself in her songs. Not her alone, because I am never ever an exclusivist, but my playlist during this period has been almost half full of her songs. Or songs related to her, i.e., songs sung by her which were later also sung by others. As far as music is concerned, this has been one of the major obsessions so far. And it doesn’t look like I am going to get over it soon. I don’t mind it, of course.

I even found some notes and tunes familiar from Hindi film songs, which are the true melting pot of music like nothing else.

Did I say I will talk about it later?

Let it be said that I have listened to a very wide variety of music from around the world and claim to have a very good musical sense. So, now that you know about my qualifications for writing about her and the movie based on her (I guess you already know that I also claim to have a very good cinematic sense), I can get on and you better take me seriously.

Heh! Heh! Where is your degree?

First, I will say what has already been said by all. Marion Cotillard has given a great performance in this movie as the legendary singer. It’s hard for me to forget that she is not really Édith Piaf.

By the way, she became the first actor (or actress) to “ever win an Academy Award for Best Actress (“Oscar”) for a performance entirely in French”. Given that winning an Academy Award is considered the height of achievement for people working in the movies, doesn’t it sound a bit strange? I mean French directors (along with directors from other countries from Europe and Asia) have been making movies and setting the standards for others for a long time now and French actors have been acting in them. Well enough to deserve world class awards.

How easy it is to forget that the Oscars, the Academy Awards, are mainly meant for English movies. There is just one magnanimous (or guest, if you like) category for ‘Foreign language movies’. But everyone behaves as if the Academy Awards are equally for all movies of the world.

Can we expect globalization of the Academy Awards? I won’t bet on it.

Except that I have never bet.

The spell checker has identified ‘globalization’ as an invalid word. I am adding it to the dictionary. The spell checker also doesn’t recognize ‘exclusivist’ as a valid word. I am adding this word too.

I have heard the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ somewhere. I also heard a rumor (rumour for the non-dominant party) that computers now have some of it. Why do I feel a bit relieved that it is just a rumor?

Coming back to the movie, it is about a singer who, as someone said, “belts them out, doesn’t she?”. She does indeed. And she does just great. I have become her lifetime admirer. For whatever is left.

She was a born singer. She started on the street. She was the daughter of an acrobat and a street singer. For some time she lived in a brothel managed by her grandmother, where she was treated very well. One of the prostitutes became so fond of her that she was heartbroken and hysterical when the father came back for his daughter. With her father, she (the singer to be) lived in a circus. Later she accompanied her father on his acrobatic (contortionist) street shows and started singing. Then she sang on the streets with her half-sister, who remained close to her till her death, except for some time when she felt ignored and abandoned by the star singer.

She was discovered by a nightclub owner. She was suspected of involvement in his murder, but was cleared. She denied that she had anything to do with that and I would prefer to believe that. I would rather give her the benefit of doubt than to Henry Kissinger. Or so many like him, even if not his equal in douchehood.

She sang under the protection of local mafia men, who took their share, obviously. She met a composer, Marguerite Monnot, who also became her ‘most loyal friend’ for the rest of her life. Then she was mentored by a composer who was also a poet and a businessman. She became popular on the radio as well as on the stage. She became a star. Actually, in France, she became a super star. She mentored many people and helped them launch their career. And ‘dropped’ them when they became successful and no longer needed her mentoring. She helped launch many careers, including that of another legendary singer Yves Montand. Jean Cocteau wrote a successful one-act play ‘Le Bel Indifférent’ specially for her and she acted in it.

She was severely injured in a major car accident. Then she suffered more car accidents. Partly because of injuries from the car crashes, she got into addiction and suffered more. She fell in love with a married French boxer (who was a star in his own right in France) …

Well, according to the ethics of movie reviewing, I shouldn’t divulge too much. Suffice it, as the phrase goes, to say that if there was anyone whose life was the stuff of legend, she was the one.

I would say even more than Howard Hughes.

So much about her, what about the movie? It is one of best biopics I have ever seen. It is better than ‘The Aviator’. It is better than ‘Capote’, even though I have more than a soft spot for movies made about writers or about literature. It is better even than ‘Gandhi’. More about that last movie later.

Now the reasons why it is better. First is simply that I like it more. But more specifically, everything is almost perfect in this biopic. Direction (Olivier Dahan) is really good without being pretentious or stiff. Screenplay (Isabelle Sobelman and Olivier Dahan) is as it should be for a biopic. Realistic but still interesting. Not over the top. Neither starry eyed, nor of the kind which seems to be declaring ‘I will (academically) judge this person’s personal life and cut him or her to size’.

Marion Cotillard actually became The Little Sparrow. I don’t know whether it was with or without Method Acting. The rest of the cast also gave very convincing performances, including the actress who played Marlene Dietrich. I should make special mention of Sylvie Testud who played the role of Mômone (Simone Berteaut), Édith’s half-sister and her lifelong friend. Her lifelong partner in mischief.

For now, I will stop talking about the movie here as I intend to write a second installment of this post.

I would be proud to have lived a life like the one she lived. With warts and all.

Even now, as I write, she is singing in the background. Literally.

In the words of the movie’s Marlene Dietrich, she is taking me on a voyage to Paris. Where (unlike Marlene Dietrich) I have never been, except for half an hour at the airport when I had to keep sitting in the plane as there was a strike at the airport. So I have yet to set my feet on the soil of Paris, but The Little Sparrow, who really belts them out and who embodies the soul of Paris, has flown me around there plenty of times now.

P.S.: The strike in the above paragraph doesn’t mean terrorist strike. It means labour strike. Just in case.

And yes, labor for the dominant party.

हिन्दी ज़ेडनेट – नये अनुवाद (1)

तो आखिर मैंने हिन्दी ज़ेडनेट के लिए तीन और अनुवाद पूरे कर ही दिए। इतना समय लगने का एक कारण यह था (इसके अलावा कि मेरी उम्मीद के विपरीत और कोई अभी तक इस काम में शामिल होने के लिए आगे नहीं आया है) कि एक लेख काफ़ी लंबा था और उसमें दो कविताओं के उद्धरण थे, जिनमें से एक शायद दुनिया की सबसे अधिक पढ़ी गई कविताओं में से एक है।

उम्मीद है कविता अनुवाद के बाद भी कविता जैसी ही लगेगी।

नये अनुवाद ये हैं:

• ग़ैर-टिकाऊ अविकास: नोम चॉम्स्की
• कला, सच और राजनीति: हैरॉल्ड पिंटर
• सभ्यताओं का टकराव: नोम चॉम्स्की

और हाँ, ज़ेडनेट की साइट पूरी तरह बदली जा रही है, परिणामतः हिन्दी ज़ेडनेट भी यहाँ से अब यहाँ आ गया है।

और यह भी कि कुल अनुवादों की संख्या अब एक दहाई यानी दो अंकों तक पहुंच गई है।

तीन अंकों तक अकेले पहुंचाना मुश्किल होगा, फिर भी…

At Around is Absolutely Alright

I sometimes read the ‘Corrections and clarifications’ column of The Hindu. I don’t know why. I don’t really believe in prescriptivism, nor do I want complete linguistic anarchy. Probably just to find out the current state of linguistic legality and linguistic morality, from the point of the view of the editors as well as the grammatically sensitive readers (this adjective I didn’t want to use, but I couldn’t find better).

A couple of days ago I again read this column. It is written by the Readers’ Editor (RE) of the paper. In this particular edition (is that the right word?) of the column, a list of different kinds of errors made by journalists is given.

At one point the, the RE says:

There are some favourite expressions of journalists that keep recurring despite their absurdity.

And one of the examples given is ‘at around 4 p.m.’, which the RE says is:

a contradiction — at is specific, around is approximate

As it happens, I use this expression quite often.

So, according to the LAPD (Linguistic Abuse Police Department), I am guilty of Using Favourite Expressions Despite their Absurdity.

But I don’t think it’s a contradiction. I don’t really know what the real Linguists have to say about this, but here is my case:

1. When you want to mention a time (say, 4 p.m.) for some purpose (such as making an appointment), you can mean either 4 p.m. sharp or you can mean approximately 4 p.m., give or take 5 (or 10 or 15) minutes.
2. In the first (sharp) case, you would say ‘at 4 p.m.’, with ’sharp’ added optionally, depending on various things such as your and the other person’s habits and the equation between the two etc.
3. The question is, what will you say in the second (approximate) case? Would you say ‘meet me around 4 p.m.’? To me, it sounds very awkward.
4. Even when you do say ‘at 4 p.m.’, you cannot really mean exactly 4 p.m. because it is just not possible physically. This is actually mentioned in some Linguistics literature, though I don’t remember where.
5. Quite often when you say ‘at 4 p.m.’, you actually mean approximately at 4 p.m. Then what is the need of using ‘at around 4 p.m.’ if ‘at 4 p.m.’ can mean approximately at 4 p.m.? To make the approximate nature explicit.
6. In that case, why not use ‘approximately at 4 p.m.’ instead of ‘at around 4 p.m.’? Because the latter sounds better (and shorter and more informal) than the former.
7. My question: Is ‘around’ used at all for specifying time, excluding the cases where it starts a sentence or a clause? Since I am not a ‘native speaker’ of English, however many tons of pages of good English I may have read and however many thousands of publishable and published pages of English I may have written, my linguistic intuition about the Global Language may be questionable.
8. Therefore, I can only resort to empirical evidence. So I searched for the term ‘around 4 p.m.’ on the Web. What I find is that ‘around 4 p.m.’ is used quite often. However, almost all of this usage is in fragments, not in complete sentences (again excluding the cases where it starts a sentence or a clause).
9. In almost all complete sentences, the usage is ‘at around 4 p.m.’.
10. So, it seems that hardly anyone uses ‘around 4 p.m.’ to specify an approximate time. Most people use ‘at around 4 p.m.’.
11. Which makes perfect sense to me, because it doesn’t sound awkward to me and everyone understands perfectly what I mean. In fact, it even sounds more musical to me than just saying ‘around 4 p.m.’. Excluding the cases mentioned earlier.
12. In linguistic terms, it can be explained by saying that ‘at’ in this case is the preposition, whereas ‘around’ is not a preposition. They are serving different syntactic and semantic purposes. ‘Around’ is modifying ‘4 p.m.’ to convert it, so to say, from an instant to an interval. ‘At’, on the other hand is doing what prepositions do. Connecting constituents and specifying the relationships among them.
13. It might be said that ‘at’ can only occur with an instant, not with an interval. In that case, it can also be argued that in reality there is no such thing as an instant (a point on the time scale with zero ‘width’). There are only intervals (points do have some non-zero ‘width’) and ‘around’ is just increasing the size of this interval.
14. If you do insist that there are instants and ‘at’ can come only with instants, then it can be explained thus. ‘At’ is indeed coming with an instant but that instant is not exactly at ‘4 p.m.’ but somewhere near ‘4 p.m.’ (3:55 p.m. or 4:05 p.m.). ‘Around’ is being used to express this uncertainty.

Thus, as far as I can see, ‘at around 4 p.m.’ is absolutely alright. There is nothing absurd about it. Perhaps the law to which the LAPD is referring is absurd. That seems very likely. After all, every law book has more than enough absurd laws.

By the way, I also searched in the BNC corpus and the only sentence returned for ‘around 4 p.m.’ was this:

George Mayo was last seen at around 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon.

I think it is not surprising at all, I mean the fact that there are so many absurd laws and rules. If you are the law maker or the law enforcer (or both) and you only make reasonable laws and/or enforce only reasonable laws, you are, in the South Park language, a pussy. Because if you are not, you would be able to make absurd laws and rules and get them enforced.

That’s what having power means. Doesn’t it?

Any, well, pussy, can make and enforce reasonable laws and rules.

Chomsky at His Best

I have read quite a lot of Chomsky. And here I mean his non-Linguistic writings. But today I found the transcript of an answer that he gave after a lecture on 5th November 2001 in Delhi. It’s Chomsky at his best.

Within one answer to a question about the idea of Clash of Civilizations, he has compressed almost everything that one needs to know to understand how the world works. Even though I am very much familiar with his ideas, it was a treat to read this transcript.

I can’t resist the temptation to just quote him wholesale in this post. It’s not a very long article, so it can be read quite quickly. If you think something that he is saying is wrong, you can go ahead and verify it. He has written about the details elsewhere.

As there is no need for me to add or explain, I will just quote. I hope I am not infringing on anyone’s IPR. If I am, I will withdraw the quote. But I would hate to do that.

Here he is:

Remember the context of Huntington’s thesis, the context in which it was put forth. This was after the end of the Cold War. For fifty years, both the US and the Soviet Union had used the pretext of the Cold War as a justification for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out. So if the Russians wanted to send tanks to East Berlin, that was because of the Cold War. And if the US wanted to invade South Vietnam and wipe out Indo-China, that was because of the Cold War. If you look over the history of this period, the pretext had nothing to do with the reasons. The reasons for the atrocities were based in domestic power interests, but the Cold War gave an excuse. Whatever the atrocity carried out, you could say it’s defence against the other side.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pretext is gone. The policies remain the same, with slight changes in tactics, but you need a new pretext. And in fact there’s been a search for pretexts for quite a long time. Actually, it started twenty years ago. When the Reagan Administration came in, it was already pretty clear that appeal to the pretext of the Russian threat was not going to work for very long. So they came into office saying that the focus of their foreign policy would be to combat the plague of international terrorism.

That was twenty years ago. There’s nothing new about this. We have to defend ourselves from other terrorists. And they proceeded to react to that plague by creating the most extraordinary international terrorist network in the world, which carried out massive terror in Central America and Southern Africa and all over the place. In fact, it was so extreme that its actions were even condemned by the World Court and Security Council. With 1989 coming, you needed some new pretexts. This was very explicit. Remember, one of the tasks of intellectuals, the solemn task, is to prevent people from understanding what’s going on. And in order to fulfil that task, you have to ignore the government documentation, for example, which tells you exactly what’s going on. This is a case in point.

Just to give you one illustration. Every year the White House presents to Congress a statement of why we need a huge military budget. Every year it used to be the same: the Russians are coming. The Russians are coming, so we need this monstrous military budget. The question that anyone who is interested in international affairs should have been asking himself or herself is, what are they going to say in March 1990? That was the first presentation to Congress after the Russians clearly weren’t coming – they were not around any more. So that was a very important and extremely interesting document. And of course, it is not mentioned anywhere, because it’s much too interesting. That was March 1990, the first Bush Administration giving its presentation to Congress.

It was exactly the same as every year. We need a huge military budget. We need massive intervention forces, mostly poised at the Middle East. We have to protect what’s called the ‘defence industrial base’ – that’s a euphemism that means high-tech industry. We have to ensure that the public pays the costs of high-tech industry by funnelling it through the military system under the pretext of defence.

So it was exactly the same as before. The only difference was the reasons. It turned out that the reasons we needed all this was not because the Russians were coming, but – I’m quoting – because of the ‘technological sophistication of Third World powers.’ That’s why we need the huge military budget. The massive military forces aimed at the Middle East still have to be aimed there, and here comes an interesting phrase. It says, they have to be aimed at the Middle East where ‘the threat to our interests could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.’ In other words, sorry, I’ve been lying to you for fifty years, but now the Kremlin isn’t around any more so I’ve got to tell you the truth: ‘The threat to our interests could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.’

Remember, it couldn’t be laid at Iraq’s door either, because at that time Saddam Hussein was a great friend and ally of the United States. He had already carried out his worst atrocities, like gassing Kurds and everything else, but he remained a fine guy, who hadn’t disobeyed orders yet – the one crime that matters. So nothing could be laid at Iraq’s door, or at the Kremlin’s door.

The real threat, as always, was that the region might take control of its own destiny, including its own resources. And that can’t be tolerated, obviously. So we have to support oppressive states, like Saudi Arabia and others, to make sure that they guarantee that the profits from oil (it’s not so much the oil as the profits from oil) flow to the people who deserve it: rich western energy corporations or the US Treasury Department or Bechtel Construction, and so on. So that’s why we need a huge military budget. Other than that, the story is the same.

What does this have to do with Huntington? Well, he’s a respected intellectual. He can’t say this. He can’t say, look, the method by which the rich run the world is exactly the same as before, and the major confrontation remains what it has always been: small concentrated sectors of wealth and power versus everybody else. You can’t say that. And in fact if you look at those passages on the clash of civilizations, he says that in the future the conflict will not be on economic grounds. So let’s put that out of our minds. You can’t think about rich powers and corporations exploiting people, that can’t be the conflict. It’s got to be something else. So it will be the ‘clash of civilizations’ – the western civilization and Islam and Confucianism.

Well, you can test that. It’s a strange idea, but you can test it. For example, you can test it by asking how the United States, the leader of the western civilization, has reacted to Islamic fundamentalists. Well, the answer is, it’s been their leading supporter. For instance, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world at that time was Saudi Arabia. Maybe it has been succeeded by the Taliban, but that’s an offshoot of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism.

Saudi Arabia has been a client of the United States since its origins. And the reason is that it plays the right role. It ensures that the wealth of the region goes to the right people: not people in the slums of Cairo, but people in executive suites in New York. And as long as they do that, Saudi Arabian leaders can treat women as awfully as they want, they can be the most extreme fundamentalists in existence, and they’re just fine. That’s the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world.

What is the biggest Muslim state in the world? Indonesia. And what’s the relation between the United States and Indonesia? Well, actually the United States was hostile to Indonesia until 1965. That’s because Indonesia was part of the nonaligned movement. The United States hated Nehru, despised him in fact, for exactly the same reason. So they despised Indonesia. It was independent. Furthermore, it was a dangerous country because it had one mass-based political party, the PKI, which was a party of the poor, a party of peasants, basically. And it was gaining power through the open democratic system, therefore it had to be stopped.

The US tried to stop it in 1958 by supporting a rebellion. That failed. They then started supporting the Indonesian Army, and in 1965 the army carried out a coup, led by General Suharto. They carried out a huge massacre of hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people (mostly landless peasants), and wiped out the only mass-based party. This led to unrestrained euphoria in the West. The United States, Britain, Australia – it was such a glorious event that they couldn’t control themselves.

The headlines were, ‘A gleam of light in Asia’, ‘A hope where there once was none’, ‘The Indonesian moderates have carried out a boiling bloodbath’. I mean, they didn’t conceal what happened – ‘Staggering mass slaughter’, ‘The greatest event in history’. The CIA compared it to the massacres of Stalin and Hitler, and that was wonderful. And ever since that time, Indonesia became a favoured ally of the United States.

It continued to have one of the bloodiest records in the late twentieth century (mass murder in East Timor, hideous tortures of dissidents, and so on), but it was fine. It was the biggest Islamic state in the world, but it was just fine. Suharto was ‘our kind of guy’, the way Clinton described him when he visited in the mid-nineties. And he stayed a friend of the United States until he made a mistake. He made a mistake by dragging his feet over IMF orders.

After the Asian crash, the IMF imposed very harsh orders, and Suharto didn’t go along the way he was supposed to. And he also lost control of the society. That’s also a mistake. So at that point the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, gave him a telephone call, and said literally, ‘We think it’s time for a democratic transition.’ Merely by accident, four hours later he abdicated, but Indonesia remained a US favourite.

These are two of the main Islamic states. What about the extreme Islamic fundamentalist non-state actors, let’s say the Al Qaeda network. Who formed them? They’re the creation of the CIA, British intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding, Egypt and so on. They brought the most extreme radical fundamentalists they could find anywhere, in North Africa or the Middle East, and trained them, armed them, nurtured them to harass the Russians – not to help the Afghans. These guys were carrying out terrorism from the beginning. They assassinated President Saddat twenty years ago. But they were the main groups supported by the US. So, where is the clash of civilizations?

Let’s move a little further. During the 1980s, the United States carried out a major war in Central America. A couple of hundred thousand people were killed, four countries almost destroyed, I mean it was a vast war. Who was the target of that war? Well, one of the main targets was the Catholic Church. The decade of the 1980s began with the assassination of an archbishop. It ended with the assassination of six leading Jesuit intellectuals, including the rector of the main university. They were killed by basically the same people – terrorist forces, organized and armed and trained by the United States.

During that period, plenty of church people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of peasants and poor people also died, as usual, but one of the main targets was the Catholic Church. Why? Well, the Catholic Church had committed a grievous sin in Latin America. For hundreds of years, it had been the church of the rich. That was fine. But in the 1960s, the Latin American bishops adopted what they called a ‘preferential option for the poor.’ At that point they became like this mass-based political party in Indonesia, which was a party of the poor and the peasants and naturally it had to be wiped out. So the Catholic Church had to be smashed.

Coming back to the beginning, just where is the clash of civilizations? I mean, there is a clash alright. There is a clash with those who are adopting the preferential option for the poor no matter who they are. They can be Catholics, they can be Communists, they can be anything else. They can be white, black, green, anything. Western terror is totally ecumenical. It’s not really racist – they’ll kill anybody who takes the wrong stand on the major issues.

But if you’re an intellectual, you can’t say that. Because it’s too obviously true. And you can’t let people understand what is obviously true. You have to create deep theories, that can be understood only if you have a PhD from Harvard or something. So we have a clash of civilizations, and we’re supposed to worship that. But it makes absolutely no sense.

Reminder: This is the the transcript of an answer that Chomsky gave after a lecture on 5th November 2001 in Delhi.

A Comment on an Influential Article

A colleague has been sending me links to articles by Philip Greenspun. When I got another link today and just finished reading it (a rather long article), I thought I needed to comment on that article. So here it is (I have posted it at his site too):

A great looking intellectual construction, but it is based on some fundamental flaws. So, even though a lot of the things said are correct and sensible, the most important ones are not.

For example, let’s take the practical implications: You first suggest that it is poverty that is increasing the ranks of the suicide bombers. But then you conclude that if we keep these third world incompetent Muslims poor for eternity, we might just save ourselves from terrorism. A dead giveaway I would say.

That’s the trouble with people like you. You ask others to look in the mirror, but you yourself don’t.

What about America’s record in general? I mean active participation in or encouragement of mass murder: Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.? Could that have something to do with the fact a lot of people around the world ‘hate the US’?

The ‘conventional wisdom’ that you quote (“Nations don’t have friends. They have interests.”) is from a person who is actually a mass murderer and a war criminal. You seem to have no problem with these ideas. And this person happened to be a Jew.

But so is Noam Chomsky. So was Spinoza. So was Einstein. So was Joseph Heller. So is Woody Allen.

Like most ‘Experts’, though in a slightly better way, you have presented a mixture of true facts and unjustified simplifications to come up with a theory that is sufficiently complex to bore most people into accepting it as true. It is coming from an Expert after all. Why should we bother to look deeper into it? In fact, most people will be overawed by just the MIT label.

You look hard enough at everyone else: Muslims, Europeans, Third Worlders, etc. but you are unwilling to look that hard at the deeds of the Americans, i.e., the establishment of the USA. You put the USA and Canada in the same category, but the facts, if you look deep enough, wouldn’t allow you to do this. Canada has hardly any record of imperialism and attempts of dominating the world as an unchangeable policy that can justify even mass murder, assassinations, drug trafficking to fund terrorism against enemies (as in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union) as long as it is hidden and there is scope for plausible denial.

You even refer to decolonization as if it was only a bad thing. I come from a country where more people died at the time of independence and the partition (of India at the time of ‘decolonization’) than did in the Holocaust. There is no way you are going to confuse me into thinking that the independence (decolonization) was the same as (or the cause of) the horrible events that followed. Decolonization was a good thing. A lot of the events that followed were horrible. There are two different things we ought to be talking about. But, of course, you are not interested in that. It might show the flaws in your theorizing. For example, did colonialism have anything to do with the fact that a lot of non-westerners ‘hate’ westerners even if they try their best to get into the western paradise? And the fact that the US now represents what the UK did in an earlier age. The empire that seeks to rule the whole world and won’t be satisfied until it has risen enough and then falls down (perhaps to be replaced by another empire that would also be hated by the rest of the world). At a huge cost to be paid by people other than you.

Mr. Expert-Vexpert, Please Leave Them Alone

My laptop was out of order for some days. For the last one year, since I bought it (my first), I was completely addicted to it. I became a laptop junkie. Then suddenly one day it was not available.

Life stopped.

But not for long. I picked up one book and again became a reading junkie. I finished ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ (another British Man Booker Prize winner written by an Indian woman). I won’t talk about it now. Deserves more than a few lines. I also kept reading a (Linguistics) book I am going to review. Then I picked up D. J. Taylor’s biography of George Orwell.

I have not finished it, but whatever I have read has provoked me to write this post. I will complete it and if there is something significantly better than what I have read till now, I will modify my comments. Eat my words as any person proved wrong should.

So what was in the book? A wealth. Of trivial details. Of no significance. I was hoping I would at least get some new insights about what kind of a person Orwell or Eric Blair was, if not about his work. The biographer claims to be an Expert on Orwell, so much so that when someone else wrote a book about Orwell, he reviewed it with the feeling of his territory being trespassed. He says he has read and researched Orwell for over twenty years.

He doesn’t seem to have much to show for it. I didn’t find anything new of any value about Orwell or about his work, even though I haven’t read any other biography of Orwell. I have not even read his literature as extensively as this biographer has. Then how come I got nothing new? Because what the Orwell Expert presents to the reader are a deluge of bits of information which are not even well connected. And these bits tell nothing of interest or consequence which can’t be obtained from reading Orwell’s two three novels (1984, Animal Farm), one or two non-fiction books (Homage to Catalonia), some essays written by him (Shooting an Elephant, Reflections on Gandhi) and some essays written about him (Tourism among the Dogs by Edward Said).

What the bit torrent from the big expert boils down to is that Orwell was not really a ’secular saint’ and that he was just a mortal with many shortcomings. Of course, all this comes with a lot of technical trappings, just to show how big an expert the biographer is about Orwell and how much research he has done.

Big deal.

I knew that much just by reading one of his books.

The fact is that Orwell was one of those authors who are quite self-conscious and self-consciously responsible. He doesn’t really hide what kind of a person he is. Of course, a small margin is due to everyone, including the saints. He shows up in his writings quite clearly. The biographer (I am not writing about Taylor because I want to make a general point: My objective is not to review his book) does try very hard to show that Orwell was in many ways different from the impressions his books give. But he fails miserably. Every ‘insight’ that he tries to derive from his extensive research of two decades is easily derivable from the books written by Orwell. From just a few of his books.

Mind you, I do believe that trivia can give illuminating insights quite often. But not always and not everywhere. The biographer seems to have forgotten that.

The fact also is that Edward Said, who wrote quite critically and disapprovingly, did a much better job at showing that Orwell was not as great a human being as some of his fans might believe. And he did this in a short essay I mentioned earlier, not in a fat book.

Tell you what: George Orwell or Eric Blair was nonetheless a great and rare human being and an even greater a writer. He was (relatively) exceptionally honest in his writings. What’s more important, he was unpretentiously honest, which many of the ‘high class’ elite writers, artists, scientists, movie makers etc. are not. Of course he was no saint. He never claimed he was. Just as Gandhi didn’t: A fact which Orwell pointed out in his essay.

Knowingly or unknowingly, the ultimate effect of the book (in cases where it has turned out to be effective) is to undermine Orwell’s writings and concentrate on showing that Orwell has two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two hands, etc. and that he ate food to keep alive, that he needed money to buy food, that he had to earn money, that he managed to earn some money from writing, that he tried to have relations with women, that he even flew into a rage once in a long while etc. Very illuminating. Should we thank the author to tell us that Orwell was a more or less normal human being but was also quite different?

There are references to Orwell’s writings, of course, but they mostly seem to be dismissive in the sense that author is more interested in proving the above mentioned fact than what Orwell’s work tells us. There are a few interesting things, but they are very infrequent.

Orwell’s name has been so much misused that it’s no less than a tragedy that a person who claims Orwell to be his territory and has read and researched on him for over twenty years seems to be so little interested in the insights that can be obtained from Orwell’s life and his work and so much more interested in the fact that Orwell studied at Eton.

I would any day prefer a ‘fictional’ biography like Lust for Life if I want to know about Van Gogh. Even if I want to read a ‘researched’ biography, I would like to read again (third time) Awaaraa Maseehaa (आवारा मसीहा) by Vishnu Prabhakar (विष्णु प्रभाकर) if I want to refresh my knowledge about Sharat Chandra (शरतचंद्र). Or Ray Monk’s Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude. Even though Ray Monk didn’t really like Russell, he still tells you much more about Russell. And he doesn’t waste pages in his two (fat) volume biography on proving that Russell had two eyes and so on.

My advice to expert-vexperts like Mr. Taylor, researching writers or artists, is to just leave them alone.

Do something useful with your life. Orwell’s work can give a lot of clues about that.

For the rest, just leave him alone. Your kind of expertise is not worth two pennies. Or two pens. Or two pencils.

P.S.: Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that this Expert of Literature understands so little of literature. You shouldn’t really expect much from a person who calls Guliver’s Travels a ‘children’s classic’.

(Wo)man’s Inhumanity to (Wo)man

Someone (Bill Blakemore), in an article about the The Shining, had said that it is a part of a multi-film oeuvre ‘about mankind’s inhumanity to man that he’s [Stanley Kubrick] been making at least since Dr. Strangelove’. In this post I will write about another movie on this topic, but directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (as I had promised once).

The movie is Malena, and some reviewers might call it a movie about erotic romance. While that is not completely wrong, I think the main theme of the movie is definitely not erotic romance. Nor is it the ’sexual awakening of a boy entering puberty’ as one reviewer suggested, even though this is one of the themes. For me, it is quite clear that the central character of the movie is not the voyeuristic boy who is getting ’sexually awakened’, but the woman who is the object of his (distant) love and who does not seem to be aware of him. She is the central character because it is she who is the centre of everyone’s attention in the town in which the movie is set, not just of the boy. The fact that the movie is named after her, supports my view, but my view is not dependent on that fact alone.

She, i.e., Malena (played admirably by Monica Belucci, whatever you might think of her other performances) looks like ‘the goddess of love’ or even ‘the goddess of sex’ as someone mentioned (I can’t give the references, because I had read all those reviews long ago and right now I am not in the mood to search for them again). But, for the town’s people in general, she is like a beautiful witch. And, accordingly, is constantly hunted and ultimately hounded out like a witch. For the simple reason that she is different from others and, what is an even bigger crime in our civilization, keeps away from others; doesn’t mingle with the mob. Keeps aloof. That’s unpardonable. That she is amazingly beautiful so that all the men (and boys) of the town are obsessed with her, and (like the boy narrator) not just fantasize about her but talk about her all the time. And they don’t say very nice things when they gossip about her.

The women are even more obsessed about her. First, because she is more beautiful than them; second because their men are after her (even though she doesn’t encourage any of them), and third because she keeps aloof and doesn’t put herself in her place where she won’t be (so to say) above themselves. For example, they probably wouldn’t have so much ‘pathological’ hatred for her if she kept her good looks somewhat hidden and dressed badly and became part of the gossiping community and by following the social norms, sent definite signals that she doesn’t think she is better than them.

You see, it’s not enough that she doesn’t send any signals that is she is better than them. She has to send clear signals that she doesn’t think she is better than them. That’s a social law. She could only be exempted from this law if she were something like a royalty, a princess, or if she were a powerful woman actually above all of them in the sense that she had power (legal or otherwise) to punish them, rightly or wrongly. The film is set in Cicily of the Fascist era. So, if she were the female Il Duce, or the wife of the Il Duce, or at least the wife of a powerful general, she could have been exempted from this law.

There is another fact which makes her a witch. Her husband is a soldier and is away during the war. She lives alone. And then the news comes that her husband is dead. In the extremely patriarchal society of which she is a member, another social law applies: no husband, no status. A society in which you ‘measure yourself’ in inches and there is no chance that you can go beyond ten. Your human worth is less than ten inches.

Her father is alive, but he lives in his own house. What’s more, he is deaf and a teacher in the school in which the boy protagonist studies. So we are again and again shown scenes of the classroom where Malena’s father is teaching and the boy students (I have seen the movie twice, but I don’t remember any girl student) are all the time competing with one another in saying the nastiest things about Malena while addressing her deaf father who is teaching them. Finally he is sent an anonymous note saying something like Malena sleeps with everyone in the town, after which even the father breaks his relations with his daughter. Malena used to go to her father’s place to take care of him, but suddenly one day she finds that he has locked her out.

Then the father is killed in an air raid and there is the funeral. The life goes on in the same way. By which I mean that the men, the women and the boys are making the same kinds of comments about her during the funeral ceremony while at the same time rushing to kiss her and offer their ’support’.

Since she doesn’t really have the power to punish them and is only above them in the sense that she is more beautiful and more of an attraction to the men, she becomes the witch of the town. And, following the age old traditions of witch hunting (which are still present in all societies of the world), she is hunted and ultimately hounded out. She does return, but only when her soldier husband comes back alive from the war (who was thought to be dead) and brings her back with some anonymous help from the boy protagonist. He loved her and she loved him too, even if she was considered a prostitute by the people of the town (or village, if you please). The fact was that she was pushed into prostitution after a long spell of hunting and hounding and social boycott where no one would even sell her fresh food. She had to go to absurd lengths just to buy food and the men who obliged her, wanted to be paid back in the currency of her physical beauty.

As the war ends and the ‘liberating’ American army marches in, we are shown the culmination of the women’s hatred for Malena. We know that there are many prostitutes in the town, but as soon as the war against Fascism ends, the women celebrate the event by dragging out Malena and almost lynching her. They tear her clothes and cut her hair, leave her bloody and half naked and direct her to leave the town. (Having no other option, she does leave the town later). When there has been enough beating and the women stop, we see her shouting for the first time, facing the men who had been silently watching the whole thing. I don’t want to describe this, but as I have come so far, I can’t avoid it. Her shout or cry or whatever you call it expresses all the anguish which has been accumulated over the long preceding period. The shout is probably addressed to the men, asking them (I imagine) whether they don’t have anything to do or say about what is being done to her, when till now they were all so obsessed with her and wanted to be her lovers. In fact, earlier we are shown an almost hilarious (it would be hilarious if it wasn’t tragic) competition among the men for the claim of her affections, right in front of her door. The men actually fight over who is Malena’s lover and the fight is broken up by their wives. Malena had no direct or indirect role to play in this incident. And, of course, the public opinion decides that the culprit was Malena. Believe it or not, a court case is brought against Malena about this affair.

This court case is just one of the humiliations which she has to go through daily. Even right after the opening scene we see a bunch of teenage boys waiting for Malena to come out and to stalk her right through her walk. This turns out to be a daily routine, and the boy protagonist has an advantage in this because he has just got a bicycle. Mercifully, he is a bit discreet in doing this.

(More to come…)

The Relevance of ‘Shared Tasks’ in NLP

Even after centuries of studies, we still have very little hard scientific knowledge about natural languages (NLs). Unlike in other branches of engineering, we don’t know the exact physical or mathematical laws which NLs follows, or even whether they do. So, at least for the time being, we can only rely on empirical techniques for solving practical problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Even after some general approach seems to hold promise for solving a problem, a lot of practical work remains to be done in refining the methods and in tuning the systems for the best possible performance. This is why once some initial breakthrough has been made, a lot of people have to try the techniques under different conditions to figure out what is the best setup, i.e., the best selection of parameter values, features, etc. What has come to be called a ’shared task’ is one way of ensuring that this gets done.

Shared tasks are contest like events where many researchers or even developers working on a particular problem or a set of similar problems try to come up with the best systems. All the systems are evaluated on the same data to provide a fair, competition like setting. All the participants also have to submit papers describing their systems. The major goals of a shared task are:

• To find out what is the state of the art in a specific area
• To simultaneously advance the state of the art, even if slightly
• To bring together researchers so that they can interact and perhaps argue and discuss
• To act as an incentive for the researchers to build proper systems, some of which may become available for use by others

It was in view of this that the NLP Association of India (NLPAI) started conducting an annual event called the NLPAI Machine Learning Contest in which researchers, including students, are invited to participate and compete in solving a specific problem which is considered relevant. Last year the topic of the shared task was Shallow Parsing for South Asian languages. A workshop was also organized as an extension of this event as part of the IJCAI conference, which was held in Hyderabad, India. The topic this year was Named Entity Recognition for South and South East Asian languages. This year’s event will also have an extended version in the form of a workshop as part of the IJCNLP conference, which is also going to be held in Hyderabad, India.

In the context of South Asian languages, conducting a shared task has its own problems. This is because funding for them is usually unlikely. Without funding it is difficult to prepare the reference data which is usually essential for a shared task. Those who have annotated data are often unwilling to share it with others. IIIT has taken a lead in preparing annotated data for various purposes and also sharing it with others. Since the data is prepared under difficult conditions, sometimes there are problems with the data, but let’s hope things will improve. In any case, data with some errors is better than no data.

Another problem is that the number of full time researchers in NLP is quite small in South Asia, which affects the quality of submissions, but the shared tasks are meant to get over this situation by creating awareness and interest.

It needs to be emphasized that the goal is not just to show good performace on the data provided but also to build practically usable systems that perform well in general. This implies that the participants are supposed to go beyong being mere competitors in a contest. And the idea is to go further than just being the first in the race. Participation in a shared task should be a milestone, not the final destination.

I feel compelled to end this write up by saying that shared tasks with focus on South Asia can only succeed if there is collaboration and sharing of resources by researchers working in South Asia. We are still far from that situation.

The IJCNLP NER workshop site is located here.

(This write up was originally written for the NLPAI newsletter called Spandan, but it was taking a lo…ng time, I became impatient and so you find it here)