Mr. Harvey, I Presume

I have been wondering for a long time who it is that keeps pitching in with some (written) comments (in italics) in the middle of my blog posts. The fact that I usually ignore him doesn’t seem to have affected him.

The consolation is that at least someone is reading what I write.

But still, I wanted to know who it is. And I think I might have the answer now, after watching the movie ‘Harvey‘ starring James Stewart, an actor with one of the most likable screen presences. He doesn’t play Harvey, by the way, he plays a person (Elwood P. Dowd) who was “oh so smart” till he was thirty five, but who recommends oh so “pleasant. And you may quote me.” after that, in the company of an invisible friend called Harvey, who is a six feet three and a half inches tall rabbit, visible only to Harvey, but occasionally also to his sister, and finally even to the top Doctor of the ’sanatorium’.

At the end of the movie, he (Dowd) is saved from being given a serum that will “stop him seeing the rabbit”. He is saved by the mouthing of the experiences of a cab driver who warns Dowd’s sister, who wanted him cured so that she and her daughter could have a social life, which is denied to them due to the craziness of her brother. The cab driver says that Elwood will become “just a normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are.”

A lot goes on, obviously, between the beginning and the end of the movie. But I am not going to talk about that right now.

Self indulgence! I, I, me, me, my, oh, my!

So what I thought after seeing the movie was that perhaps this commenter-in-italics is Harvey. Not the same Harvey, of course. A great deal of water has disappeared from the rivers of this planet since that movie was made. The political and other maps have changed a lot. The Big Weapons have spread around some more. Newer kinds of wars have been invented and still newer may be on their way. Lots of us are working hard towards that. More jungles have been cleared for the onward march of the civilization. ‘Battlegrounds’ is now an insufficient term as real battles with weapons can now be fought far above the grounds, up among the stars. People have become much more polite and they now know how to be racist, sexist, fundamentalist, Fascist etc. without saying any bad words. So the progress goes on.

Naturally, then, the Harvey that is appearing on my blog is a different version. He’s is not even similar to the one that was seen in Donnie Darko. He seems to be of a post-modern (or perhaps a post-post-modern) variety.

I must confess that I don’t like this Harvey as much as Dowd liked that Harvey. But there he is. And I have to bear with him.

As I said, at least someone is reading and even commenting. So I dedicate this post to the post-modern Harvey.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to my not-friend, Mr Harv…

Quick! Someone call the sanatorium!

Evolution Doesn’t Have Nuclear Weapons

 

 

But we do.

 

 

Screwball Horror

This movie is supposed to belong to a genre called ’screwball comedy’. Well, there was some comedy in it, of a very black sort, which is fine with me because I like black comedy. It is the kind of comedy found in the real world in the most abundant quantity.

However, what I felt most while watching the movie, especially after the first twenty minutes or so, can only be described by the word ‘horror’. Screwball horror.

The movie I am talking about is called ‘His Girl Friday’. It is a story about an unbelievably unscrupulous newspaper man and another newspaper ‘man’ who is actually a woman and who was previously his wife and his primary reporter. His Girl Friday, as the title says. She is almost equally unscrupulous, but this we find out a bit later into the movie.

Since she is just a bit less unscrupulous than him, she got fed up at one point (before the movie starts) and divorced him to go and become ‘a human being’. At the start of the movie, she seems to be on the way and has found a human being (an insurance agent) to marry (who loves her) and comes to the office of her former husband to inform him of the news.

But her former husband has other designs. He is determined to not let her go. As we find out later, not because he ‘loves’ (whatever that means) her, but because she is too good a reporter (of the kind shown in the movie and of the kind often found in real life) to be let off and also because, as a person, she is of the same flock, and would have been much better off had she stayed married to the reporter.

As it happens, a man is going to be hanged the next day and there is great news capital that can be made out of that. The man happens to be a poor man who was fired after a long spell of loyal service, who started getting drunk and started attending some union meetings just because he had nothing else to do. Then something happened some day and he shot a cop. He says accidentally. The cop happened to be a colored man and the colored vote is important in the locality concerned. So, the governor doesn’t want to give him a reprieve as the elections are coming.

So far so good. But, as the reporter (editor? owner? all in one?) tries every trick in his morally anarchic bag, and after he has got his former wife to stay for a few hours (he has a plan) and interview the convict (which she does) for a great story, the convict escapes during his ‘psychoanalysis’ by a shrink from New York.

The Wikipedia page says this is where the fun begins. I don’t think the statement is accurate. Actually, this is where the little bit of fun (as I understand it) that was there ends and true horror begins.

I don’t have the patience (or the stomach) to describe everything that happens after this. We begin to really understand the distinction made by the screenplay writer between newspaper men and human beings (which a notice at the start of the movie indicates doesn’t apply in the ‘present’ times).

Basically, what we see is almost everyone (newspaper men, cops, politicians etc.) behaving like monsters, except that there is no (visible) blood and gore. Without batting an eyelid. Or bowling an eyelid for that matter.

The game of the hanging to be (which later becomes shooting to be) gets dirtier and dirtier, till we realize that the director is not just showing us a screwball comedy, or a satire, or a black comedy. We realize that the genre to which the movie belongs is that of the blood and the gore which flows thick through the stream of rapid fire dialog but is not directly visible to the eyes.

Because it is not directly visible to the eyes, some people (who don’t look at such things very hard as it might upset their constitution or their life) can understandably call the movie a screwball comedy.

The director has to be given credit for sticking with the idea throughout and not giving us a falsely feel good ending.

Almost all the characters in the movie, who all belong to a particular class, are not bothered, even superficially, by such trifles as deaths of human beings. Even when they might be causing it. They are not shaken even by the most moving emotional outbursts by one of the few ‘human beings’ in the movie who had talked kindly to the man to be hanged and is therefore branded a murderer’s girl friend.

So there is enough horror in the movie to make it feel more like amplified (albeit sanitized) ‘Clockwork Orange’ than, say, ‘Some Like it Hot’ or ‘It Happened One Night’.

But there is some more horror off the film. Like in the movie, this horror can also be seen in the trivia:

• The director Howard Hawks, who could be perceived to be a closet commie (by many) in this movie, was known to make anti-semitic remarks. Ben Hecht, whose play was adapted for the movie, was Jewish and is known for his anti-Holocaust activism.
• Rosalind Russell, who played the female lead (the newspaper ‘man’), hired her own writer to ‘punch up’ her dialogs to make them as good as that of Cary Grant, who played the male lead. Did she mean her dialogs were not as horror inducing as that of the Hero?
• The man to be hanged is white (even if trash) and he had shot a colored cop. Not vice versa, which would be much more likely given the demographic and other statistics.
• The fact that I mentioned earlier. That this movie is considered to be a screwball comedy. Not even a black comedy.
• The corollary to the fact mentioned above. That horror can be mistaken for fun and enjoyed accordingly.

I won’t accuse the director for giving us some escapist fare. Not even of making a feel good movie.

Nor of making a comedy.

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.

Evolution Doesn’t Have a Conscience

 

 

But we do.

 

 

Shelly, Monk, Russell and Frankenstein …

… unite in The Spirit of Solitude.

Byron too.

Actually, it is not Frankenstein but Frankenstein’s Monster. I used to get it wrong. A lot of people still do.

The sackful of books I had mentioned earlier, included a 1904 edition of Shelly’s ‘Poetical Works’. Yes, I have a book that was printed more than hundred years ago. One of these poems is called ‘Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude’. Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell is called ‘Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude’. And ‘Frankenstein’ was, of course, written by Mary Shelly (who happened to be P.B. Shelly’s wife, in case you are not aware).

Note the unshakable sexism or general bias in ‘Shelly’ sufficing to refer to ‘P. B. Shelly’ but not to ‘Mary Shelly’.

The above may just be interesting trivia, but there is something else related to the title of this post which is not so trivial.

I had watched a film version of ‘Frankenstein’ as a child on TV. After that, innumerable times, I have read about the book as well as film versions. Almost always the only themes that are discussed are some variations on man’s meddling in God’s creation or the unimaginable effects of scientific magic.

Many years ago when I read Mary Shelly’s original ‘Frankenstein’, I was completely taken aback by the fact that (what seemed to me) the main theme was not mentioned anywhere. Not prominently at least.

Of course, someone might have mentioned it prominently and I may not have come across it. I don’t know everything, you know.

Today I happened to pick up that 1904 book and came across the poem mentioned above. And I was amazed to see that the poem is on the same theme which I had thought was one of the main themes of ‘Frankenstein’. It can also be mentioned here that the idea for this novel was conceived during a long conversation among the Shellys and Byron in the Alps.

If you are not too straitjacketed, you can find similarities between Byron and Frankenstein’s Monster and also between the hero of the poem mentioned above and Frankenstein’s Monster. And Ray Monk used the title of that poem for his biography of Bertrand Russell. Not fascinating?

I hope you do understand that having similarities doesn’t mean being the same. And also that similarities in such a context have to be of some significance. That doesn’t include the fact that all of them had two eyes and two ears etc. Moreover, the similarities are uninteresting without the differences.

What’s the bloody theme?

The theme is quite a familiar one, except that the intensity is what makes it special. That intensity is in the individuals concerned. In how the society responds to the individuals. And vice versa.

But I have already mentioned the theme more than once.

The Spirit of Solitude. What else?

Pray, what does ‘The Spirit of Solitude’ mean?

Well, it doesn’t exactly mean what you may at first think. For example, it doesn’t only mean that the individual concerned Likes to be Alone. He might. Usually. But not always. Remember that old saying? Man is a social animal? Well, even misanthropes need some company. Friendly company. Reliable company. It also means other things which I will talk about later.

By the way, neither the Shellys nor Bertrand Russell can truly be called misanthropes. Byron was perhaps one. Was Frankenstein’s Monster a misanthrope? Well, whether he was or was not, but he certainly was forced to become one, as the novel quite clearly (and in detail) shows.

I don’t know about Ray Monk.

Aren’t you going overboard, comparing a monster to those literary and philosophical giants?

No, I am not. I have thought quite a lot about it and tried to find evidence for and against it. Frankenstein’s Monster, as presented in Mary Shelly’s novel, was hardly the monster he is made out to be in the movies, in popular culture and even in language (as in “BJP has created a Frankenstein”: That monster is much more dangerous than poor Frankenstein’s ever was).

But the connections get still more interesting.

I have not Googled all this information. I have earned it all in the old fashioned way.

The connections get interesting because Bertrand Russell, in his great and unique ‘History of Western Philosophy’ called ‘Frankenstein’ an allegory of the Romanticist movement of the 19th century. (Byron, Shelly and Keats were the central figures of that movement in literature). This is one of my favourite (favorite) books, but I have no hesitation in saying that Russell got it (at least partly) wrong. He also missed the theme I have mentioned. I mean he was right in pointing out some of the shortcomings of the Romantics, but he got the Frankenstein part wrong. I don’t agree with his interpretation of the novel or of the character.

Since Shelly has done the work for me, I will just point to him to further elaborate on the theme.

No apology for name dropping because, as I said earlier, I have earned it all. In the old fashioned way. Even if I am writing about it in the new fashioned way.

An Example of Gory Details

I have been familiar with the phrase ‘gory details’, as anyone has been who has read newspapers or watched TV.

However, today I saw this phrase with a completely new meaning. It was quite a revelation. This is how it goes:

Even if you have severe constraints on resources due to funding (I sympathize…), I recommend not discussing them in quite as gory detail as you do. A very brief mention of the amount of effort invested to date is sufficient.

Gee, thanks for the sympathy. Now I will be able to run my next project on this great resource.

And these are the gory details (complete and unabridged) to which the above quote refers:

Since x has so far mostly been the result of individual effort and it is a non-funded project being undertaken on part-time basis, there were the most stringent resource (financial, temporal, etc.) constraints.

(Only the names have been changed).

Quite a lesson in Semantics. Or is it Pragmatics? Perhaps both. Great. Very original.

By the way, another lesson I have learnt over the years is that your project is not a project unless it is funded.

Without funding, your work is illegitimate, at least in the research community.

Oops! Sorry for the gory details. Obscene. Vulgar. Indecent. Pervert. Lewd. Salacious. Detestable. Repulsive. Repugnant. Abhorrent.

 

 

(I will add more context for this post later).

The Sign of a Mature Institution

(Courtesy the makers of Rushmore)

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’.