My review of 2012

So another year is coming to an end. Every year I look back on the past 12 months, to review my cultural and intellectual activities. It is a useful exercise to reflect on all that one has done and to relate it to other real-time happenings during the year; a rite of passage in the form of taking stock of one`s life at the turn of the year. As usual, let me start with the books:

Books

1) The London Train by Tessa Hadley – ISBN 9780099552260 – Vintage p/b 2012 – © T H 2011 – 324 pp = an unhappy young middle class woman, a teacher turned library assistant married to a high ranking Home Office civil servant in charge of immigration (a lot of interesting detail about the working of the system and contemporary British society) takes up with a middle-aged man with the sexual appetite and morals of the 1960s generation going through a menopausal phase, who is having domestic and family problems of his own and who finds himself involved with his pregnant daughter`s Polish boyfriend and his sister – (note: during this period (Jan-Feb), I went through a whole collection of books by way of research for my paper on Naipaul & Theroux and so the first two books provided some light reading).

2) Before I go to Sleep by S J Watson – ISBN 9780552164122 – Black Swan p/b 2011 – © Lola Communications 2011 – 372 pp = much hyped best seller but hugely disappointing.

3) Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif – ISBN 9780224082051 h/b – Jonathan Cape 2011 – © M Haniff 2011 – 231 pp = satirical tale of the eponymous lady`s rise and fall from her lowly status of Pakistan`s `untouchable` Christian minority `chhoora` community in Karachi, through her struggles to stay true to her professional training as a nurse in the male dominated environment of her work place and of the wider society, with a sharply observed insight into the workings of the police and the criminal world.

4) The Kindness of Women by J G Ballard – ISBN 0 00 654701 X – `The Sequel to the Empire of The Sun`- Flamingo p/b 1994 – first published by Harper-Collins – © JGB1991 – 348 pp = a frank fictionalized account of his turbulent life, much of which formed the basis of his earlier Empire epic.

5) The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson – ISBN 978 1 4088 0993 8 – Bloomsbury p/b 2011 - © HJ 2010 – 370 pp = on being Jewish in Britain, warts and all – narrowly focused but very revelatory and entertaining even if a bit too long with too much dialogue; proof of what I have always believed, that one should be able to judge a work of literature on its merit without having to like the author!

6) Britain etc: The Way We Live and How We Got There by Mark Easton – © M E 2012 – ISBN 978-0-85720-142-3 – Simon & Shuster p/b – 328 pp = an encyclopaedic journey across British society grounded in historical perspectives and factual information – an easy reference tool.

7) Mrs Robinson`s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale – ISBN 978 1 4088 1241 9 – Bloomsbury h/b – © K S 2012 – 303 pp = by the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher which I had thoroughly enjoyed in 2009; this is also a forensic study - of the downfall of a middle-class woman in mid-19th century Victorian Britain by the evidence of her own diary played out in one of the early divorce cases heard in the English High Court – with a mass of factual and historical detail about the social and cultural mores of the period – not as gripping as Mr Whicher but full of anticipatory excitement nevertheless.

8) The Lower River by Paul Theroux – ISBN 978-0-241-14532-6 (h/b) – Hamish Hamilton – © PT 2012 – 323 pp = powerful narrative, full of despondency and despair, of a journey of self-discovery into the past represented by the present of a Central African nation steeped in the culture of corruption, hunger and dependency (separately reviewed below on this blog and at http://www.nilejournal.net/archive/all/2012/8)

9) Light on Snow by Anita Shreve – ISBN 0-316-00103-1 (p/b) – BlackBayBooks – © AS 2004 – 305 pp = an emotionally engaging, absorbing family and rite-of-passage novel narrated by a precocious 12-year-old on the verge of early womanhood who is left to look after her widowed father following the tragic death of her mother (his wife) and baby sister in a car accident in NYC; the two of them move to the isolation of a New Hampshire village and in the wintry landscape discover an abandoned freshly born baby whom they rescue but then find themselves in a quandary when the mother turns up and all kinds of moral, legal and personal dilemmas and issues arise – the author unfolds and navigates this plot with deftness, sympathy and minute detail – a good, light read.

10) The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer – ISBN 978 1 4088 2875 5 – Bloomsbury h/b – © P I 2012 – 238 pp = its subtitle Graham Greene, My Father and Me is the giveaway theme and focus of the book: a mix of personal memoir and history tracing an extraordinary literary journey across time and space, charting the connection between his real father and the eponymous one in his head, and his own creative flowering - born and raised in Oxford where his father was in situ as a distinguished academic figure and where Greene`s presence was a background reality that he imbibed and couldn`t shake off even as the family moved to California - that continued through his teenage years of schooling as a boarder at Eton and commuting across the Atlantic, which no doubt gave him the travel bug that has lasted to this day - he is not shy about name-dropping, of people and places (except Eton, which he only identifies by name much later in the narrative) he has encountered across the world in the last 3 to 4 decades - above all, it is an exploration of Greene`s life and works. Iyer `s own early work `Video Nights in Khatmandu` had made a huge impression on me in 1990.

11) The Summons by John Grisham – ISBN 9780099406136 – Arrow Books p/b – 391pp – © Bodfrey Holdings Inc 2002 = a holiday read on the trip to Canada/USA; being there made a lot of sense of the physical details and social environment – an inconclusive and ambivalent ending nevertheless, with a possible sequel to follow!

12) So Much For That by Lionel Shriver – ISBN 978-0-00-727108-5 – Harper p/b – 531pp – © LS 2010 - began reading this while in US (finishing it back here) which made immediate sense there - staying with physician friend had lots of conversations about the American health care system, about insurance and lack of it, about the soaring costs of treatment, about doctors, lawyers and pharmaceuticals and their practices and ethics etc – the central character in the novel is a well-to-do utility engineer who is suddenly confronted with the news that his wife has cancer and all his carefully planned retirement plans are put in jeopardy - a very gripping narrative; instructive and informative. Shriver is the prize-winning author of We need to talk about Kevin. She does not spare her reader: all the turmoil created by the wife`s condition is examined in depth, but more than that we discover how the American way of life is dominated by health-related concerns. There is a lot more in the book - a great deal of medical and other technical detail (eg. about the `handyman` trade) and also about the man`s finances - how, with all the add-ons and co-payments, his nest-egg of investments shrinks from some $731,000+ to $3,500 in a year, despite having the benefit of his employers` insurance. Right at the beginning we learn of his plans to retire to what he considers to be an idyllic existence on the island of Pemba, which of course then go awry. The book is a bit difficult to get into, but after the first 30 pages it gets better. Shriver too is a writer whose politics and personality I dislike thoroughly, but as observed in relation to Jacobson (see 5 above), this was another test of my view that the work of an author should be judged on its own merit regardless of such other factors.

13) The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief by V S Naipaul – ISBN 978-330-47205-0 HB – Picador – © VSN 2010 – 325 pp = an ageing genius`s return to the `dark` continent; sharply observant, questioning, analysing, discursive; he engages, informs and shocks the reader with what he finds - basically that Christianity and Islam and European imperialism and its post-colonial legacy have not wiped out African prehistory, only conflated together to produce another culture as yet in the making – during his travels through Uganda, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa – while some preconceptions are strengthened, others are laid bare – this is travel writing with a mission!

14) Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan - ISBN 9780224097376 (h/b) – Jonathan Cape – © IM 2012 – 320 pp = an engaging trip into the world of spies and spinsters of the 1970s – a lot of period and political detail with several plotlines cleverly woven together to form a credible narrative.

15) Joseph Anton by +Salman Rushdie – ISBN 9780224093972 (h/b) – Jonathan Cape – © SR 2012 – 636 pp – separately reviewed below on this blog.

16) The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling – ISBN 978-1-4087-0420-2 – Little Brown h/b – © JKR 2012 – 503 pp = Rowling`s first adult novel, after her immensely successful Harry Potter run, described in the blurb as a `big novel about a small town` - one is indeed instantly drawn into the fictional setting of a provincial community somewhere in the west country – the plot `Peyton Place` like, with a whole lot of characters whose lives are intimately connected with each other and are revealed in their rawness as events unfold. The critics made heavy weather of Rowling`s use of explicit language but it fits well into the narrative, though at times one is reminded that her prime appeal as the creator of Harry Potter has been to the adolescent reader - a gripping tale that wears off as she tries to round it off on a positive note.

Again, as usual, this is an eclectic collection. All of it represents my bedtime leisure and travel/or holiday reading that also includes the London Review of Books which remains part of my nightly routine. I have not included books unfinished or abandoned. Currently, I am reading `The Taliban Cricket Club` by T N Murari; more about it next year!

Films, Plays, Concerts etc

Jan – Odeon KT1 - `The Iron Lady` - aka Margaret Thatcher – moving bio-pic of her in old age

Jan – Vaudeville Th`tr, Strand – `Masterclass` - (Tyne Daly as Maria Callas) fine acting; great drama

Jan – RFH – Philharmonia Orchestra (cond: Esa-Pekka Salonen) Beethoven: Symphony No.5 +

Feb – Odeon KT1 - `The Artist` - this was the night of the Oscars; it won, and rightly so!

Mar - Epsom P/h - `The Help` - enchanting, gripping, evocative of 1950s US

Apr - ICA – `This is not a film` Dir: Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Iranian) - great

Apr – ICA - `This Must Be The Place` - (starring Sean Penn) rubbish, left after an hour!

Apr - South Bank Purcell Rm – “Shiraz & The Sabri Ensemble” – separately reviewed on this blog

Apr – South Bank QEH – “World Book Night” hosted by Hardeep Singh Kohli – enjoyable

May – Dorking Halls – City of London Freemen`s `Class Act 3` Music Concert – enjoyable – 7/10

May – Harold Pinter Th`tr – “South Downs/The Browning Version” (D Hare/T Rattigan double bill)- brilliant - 9/10

June – ICA – “Abosheshey = At the End of it All” (Dir: Aditi Roy; Bengali-English subtitles) – 4/10

July – Haymarket Cine – “Baishay Srabon = Seventh August” (Dir: Srijit Mukherji; - 3/10

(note: both the above, from the London Indian Film Festival, were rather disappointing)

July – The Barbican - `Desdemona` by Toni Morrison, Peter Sellars and Raka Traore` (with Tina Benko as Desdemona) – a musical masterpiece of a rendering, of an imaginative version of Shakespeare`s Othello with Morrison`s critical and literary gloss on it, beautifully performed by Rika Traore` and Tina Benko (+ supporting singers) with a huge emotional & conceptual depth – 9/10

Sep – Odeon KT1 - `Anna Karenina` (Keira Knightley, Dir: Joe Wright) – good - 7/10

Sep – RFH – Philharmonia O – con:E-P Salonen – incl B/hoven 1st PianoC + 9th Symphony – 8/10

Oct – OWE2 - “The Hunt” – a brilliant, gripping Danish film - London Film Festival – 8/10

Oct – OWE2 “Midnight`s Children” – simply great – London Film Festival – 9/10

Nov – Odeon KT1 – “Skyfall” – (the latest James Bond) – neither stirred, nor shaken! - 4/10

Nov – S/B Purcell Rm - `Undiscovered India` - Alif Laila (sitar) + Kousik Sen (tabla) –good - 7/10

Dec – ICA - `False Trail` Swedish, English subtitles, Dir by Kjell Sundvall. Starring Rolf Lassgård, Peter Stormare – detective drama, starts well but goes off the rails two-thirds way down – too violent at the end – disappointing – 5/10

Lectures, Talks, Events etc

1) 15/16 Feb – Dubai – 4th Biennial GSA Conference – presenting, participating, interacting - Q&A

2) 06 Mar – SOAS – MG Vassanji: “Burton, Speke and the Cutchi Bhatias” – Ch: Itesh Sachdev - Q&A

3) 15 Mar – RSA – Mark Easton on `Britain Etc` (ch: John Kampfner) - Q&A

4) 22 Mar – RSA – Adrienne Russell - `Networked: The news in transition`- Ch: Charlie Beckett - Q&A

5) 28 Mar – Senate Ho, London U – Dr Vijaya Teelock: `Reporting on The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Mauritius (Ch: Dr Howard Jones, Inst of Com` Studies) - Q&A

6) 21 May – S/B Purcell Rm – Kate Sumerscale in conversation with Kathryn Hughes – Q&A

7) 06 Jun - RFH – Harry Belafonte (in conversation with Kirsty Lang) - simply superb

8) 14 Jun – Friends Ho, Euston – Mau Mau Justice Network mtg (noted in AwaaZ) - Q&A

9) 06 Jul – S/B: Spirit Level - `The Art of War` (panel: Michela Wrong + 2 others; ch: Bidisha) – Q&A

10) 10 Jul – S/B QEH – John Pilger (ch: Robin Denselow)– superb, riveting, informative!

11) 24 Jul – RSA – BBC “The Forum - The Big Five: Inequality” (Ch: Mary Robinson –
Panel: Prof Sir John Sulston, Tahmima Anam and Prof Lawrence Goldman)

12) 06 Sep – RSA – Gavin Esler: “Lessons from the Top” (ch: Joe Hallgarten) - Q&A

13) 20 Sep – RSA – “The Olympic Review: One man`s struggle against sporting hysteria” –Nicholas Lezard (Guardian critic – chair: Sam Leith, Lit Ed. Daily Telegraph) - Q&A

14) 03 Oct – Asia Ho – “London`s Radical South Asian Writers` - Retro Style” (Wasafiri Event - Ch: Sushila Nasta; panel: Bidisha, Daljit Nagra, Shyama Perera) - 2/10

15) 11 Oct – RSA 1 pm – “How to De-Spin a Party Conference” Eliane Glaser (ch: S Tall)

16) 15 Oct – RFH - “Man Booker Prize Readings” (ch: Jim Naughtie) – great – 9/10 - Q&A

17) 5 Nov – Br Lib Sth Asian Lit Festival – “Exploring India: The Story of a Nation” – panel: Michael Wood, Patrick French, Roy Moxham, Alex von Tunzelmann; ch: Salil Tripathi - 8/10 - Q&A

18) 6 Nov – Royal Com`Soc – “Exodus 40: Ugandan Asians in Britain Symposium” – panel:
Giles Foden, Kamlesh Madhvani, Yasmin A-Brown, Tarique Ghaffur (intro: Bhavik Mehta) – 7/10 - Q&A

19) 9 Nov - Br Lib SALF – “Making of an Empire: Mark of the Mughals on South Asia” – panel: John Keay, Timeri Murari, Susan Stronge, ch: Fergus Nicoll - 8/10 - Q&A

20) 26 Nov – Br Lib SALF - `From The Ruins of Empire` - Pankaj Mishra / Michael Wood

21) 28 Dec – Br Lib Exhb: `Mughal India-Art, Culture and Empire` – nothing new - 6/10

Foreign Travel

Out of the three trips abroad this year, the first was to Dubai for the GSA Conference, followed by a couple of days in Muscat – all a rather pleasant introduction to that part of the world – see also my write-up on that further down in this blog.

In August we visited Canada and the US, spending quality time with friends in Calgary and Milwaukee. From Calgary we also drove out to Edmonton and return via a couple of days in the Rockies which made a pleasant interlude. Likewise from Milwaukee we took day trips out to nearby places, including one to Madison, a pleasant university town.

In October, I made a short trip to Kenya – a couple of days in Mombasa and six in Nairobi – a very enjoyable return to the country of my birth on the occasion of a family wedding, meeting up with old friends and professional colleagues.

General

This year then is a continuation of the past eight, since my retirement. It has been fairly good and productive. I was particularly pleased with my paper on Naipaul and Theroux`s writings on India (Paul T liked it too!). My other researches and writings have also kept me busy throughout the year. This pattern may of course change as the ageing process takes its toll. Even so, 2012 has had a nice sound-feel; 2013 will be a little harder! For now however a happy new year to all!

RAMNIK SHAH
(c) 2012
Surrey, UK

Salman Rushdie aka Joseph Anton

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie – ISBN 9780224093972 (h/b) – Jonathan Cape – © SR 2012 – 636 pp

I remember vividly the day the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his death sentence, the `fatwa`, on Salman Rushdie on 14 February 1989, because on that day I was actually reading The Satanic Verses while lying on my hospital bed, undergoing tests for a suspected heart attack. Verses had been published in late 1988 with a fanfare of publicity and a spate of reviews, many of them quite hostile. When the fatwa was announced, there was a flurry of activity at all levels, and Rushdie was rushed into hiding by Scotland Yard`s special branch team (the prot) assigned to protect him from Iranian state sponsored assassins. One of the very first demands they made of him was to find a pseudonym for himself, `pretty pronto` with the advice `not make it an Asian name`! And so he came up with an amalgam of Conrad`s and Chekhov`s first names: Joseph Anton, now adopted by him as the title of his memoir of those years of his wilderness following the fatwa.

And so Joseph Anton (JA) became Salman Rushdie`s alter ego in very special circumstances. The standard catchphrase or acronym aka (also known as) may not therefore be quite apt, because JA was not `known` to be Rushdie`s other name - the world did not know of the connection between the two - rather it was an imaginative creation of Rushdie`s fertile mind. But the net result was the same: Rushdie adopted the name JA to shield his real identity – it was a masquerade. One of his early discoveries was that as a throwback to the adverse publicity about the book, he `was no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses, a title subtly distorted by the omission of the initial The. The Satanic Verses was a novel. Satanic Verses were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author`.

At 636 pages then, this is the longest book, as well as the weightiest (and, for 5 weeks of bedtime reading, physically the awkwardest to handle) I have read this year. It is also the most gripping and reads like a thriller, even though you know it is not a work of fiction and what the ending is. Beginning with the fateful events of Valentine`s Day 1989, Rushdie recounts everything that followed in meticulous slow motion, interspersed with reflections on his life back and forth across time and space - his family background and childhood in India, his unhappy years at Rugby and the more relaxed and fulfilling time at Cambridge, and his emergence as a writer of eminence and controversy. He is brutally frank about his past, his parents and siblings, his marriages and affairs, his relationships with his children, his literary friends and publishers, his `prot` team, and indeed all and sundry (with a lot of name-dropping) with whom he interacted during the period covered in the book.

It is not thus just a memoir but also a work of autobiography. We learn a great deal about him, his inner self, of course, but also about the politics of publishing and diplomacy, about the intricacies and intrigues of state protection for high profile individuals, about the world of literature and literary giants and prizes, and about the genesis of each of his own masterpieces. So full marks for his long-awaited self-portrait. It is rich in colour, extraordinary in detail about places and events, utterly frank about people, and makes no apology for the book that was the cause of his travails. I shall leave it at this for now; more may follow later.

RAMNIK SHAH
(C) 2012
Surrey, UK

Salman Rushdie and John le Carré end fatwa face-off

So reads The Guardian`s online headline just now, updated as of 12.56 GMT today - see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/12/salman-rushdie-john-le-carre.

How extraordinary that I should have been reading about this feud in Rushdie`s "Joseph Anton" only last night, at pp 527-531. I am thus now less than a hundred pages away from the end of this mammoth work that I began as my bed-time reading some 3/4 weeks ago. Maybe I will write more about it in my annual review; suffice it to say at this stage that this candid and detailed account of his wilderness years is indeed quite gripping. How he could have survived those years and retained his literary integrity, never mind sanity, is something to marvel at. It also gives an insight into both the politics of publishing and the politics of (state) protection, which latter turned him into a virtual prisoner. This is just a short blog to highlight the coincidence of the news story and my own journey through his splendid book for now.

RAMNIK SHAH
(c)2012
Surrey, UK

The Tarzan Returns: Paul Theroux`s `The Lower River`

While teaching at Makerere in the mid-1960s, Paul Theroux wrote two memorable and highly controversial articles in `Transition`, the leading intellectual organ of the emergent East African literati of that period, published out of Kampala Uganda. These were `Tarzan is an Expatriate` and `Hating the Asians` and drew a huge critical response which led him to defend himself in robust, if somewhat bad tempered, language in a letter to the editor that appeared under the title of `Avuncular Advice` two issues later. He maintained that racist attitudes lay at the root of the relations between Europeans and Africans on the one hand, and between Africans and Asians on the other, as a colonial hangover. All that is history and well documented.

Theroux of course is the renowned American writer whose genius, though at present much underrated, deserves to be rewarded with a Nobel Prize for Literature before too long. His impressive trajectory as an author, beginning with those early stirrings in Uganda, has in the more than four decades since morphed into a prolific collection of fiction, travel and critical writing about people and places he has encountered across the four corners of the world.

His portrayal of the post-imperial white man in Africa as the metaphorical Tarzan was, to people of my generation (as it happens, he and I were born in the same year!), instantly recognisable. No longer ruler of the `watu`, he nevertheless stood towering over them:

There was no question of equality; the fact remained that [they] simply were not the same and could therefore never have the same rights. Tarzan did not aggravate the situation; he asserted his authority over [them] very passively. When there was trouble, [they] rallied round; they served Tarzan, grunted their bubble-messages and assisted him. Except in a time of jungle crisis, Tarzan had little or nothing to do with them. Distance was understood.

Theroux explored or touched on this theme subsequently in several of his books, most notably “My Secret History” (1989) and “My Other Life” (1996), both of which were creative versions of his life and exploits, and much later in “Dark Star Safari” (2002) an account of his adventurous and at times hair raising journey from Cairo to the Cape.

Theroux first went to Africa in 1963 as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, where he taught at a school under the headmastership of David Rubadiri. In 1965, there was a plot to overthrow President Hastings Banda. Rubadiri, by then the newly independent Malawi`s Ambassador to the USA, was implicated in it and so had to leave the country. He sought refuge in Uganda and became a lecturer at Makerere, where he was later to write the much acclaimed `No Bride Price`. Later that year, Theroux drove Rubadiri`s car all the way across some 2000 miles to Kampala so that he could be reunited with it, which led to his expulsion from Malawi as a political revolutionary! That is how he also ended up as a lecturer at Makerere, with Rubadiri`s help.

On his return visit to Malawi in 2002, he discovered that one of his early books, "Jungle Lovers”, set in Malawi and critical of some aspects of life there, was still on the banned list, alongside the works of such luminaries as Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, D H Lawrence, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell and Salman Rushdie!

Theroux finally left Uganda in 1967, to first spend a few years as an academic in Singapore before moving to London with his English wife (whom he had met and married in East Africa) and their growing sons. By then he had become an established writer and later was to blossom to greater heights as he migrated from continent to continent. But all through his personal and professional life, he retained a fondness for Africa first nurtured during his expatriate years in the mid-1960s. This is how he put it in `Dark Star`:

School teaching was perfect for understanding how people lived and what they wanted for themselves. And my work justified my existence in Africa. I had never wanted to be a tourist. What I loved most about Africa was that it seemed unfinished and was still somewhat unknown and undiscovered, lying mute but imposing. What I liked then was what I still liked, village life and tenacious people, and saddleback mountains of stone and flat plains where anthills were higher than any hut.

He then describes a sort of `homecoming` to the place he had lived and worked in 35 years previously and of his disappointing encounters with later generation folks who had no memory of or empathy with the past of his time there. It is this experience that forms the fictional material for his latest book “The Lower River” (ISBN 978-0-241-14532-6 h/b - Hamish Hamilton - 2012) in which the central character, Ellis Hock, gives up his materially comfortable but spiritually sterile life in the Mystic River outskirts of Boston, USA - leaving behind an uncaring divorced wife, an estranged grown-up daughter, their only child, and few friends, after disposing of a family business that he had inherited and run for some four decades – to go back to the African village where he had spent time as a young volunteer teacher forty years previously.

(i)n his reverie, Hock remembered the Lower River, the southernmost part of the southern province, the poorest part of a poor country, home of the Sena people … a neglected tribe, despised by those who didn`t know them … associated with squalor, cruelty and incompetence. And his village, Malabo, was … small, just a cluster of huts, a tiny chapel and a primary school that he`d helped build.

His posting was only for two years but Hock stayed almost four … a record for any foreigner in the hot, miserable, bug-ridden, swampy Lower River, among the half-naked Sena people. The happiest years of his life. He learned their language, made physical improvements and extensions to the school building, acted as a counsellor to the local people, seldom left the district, fell in love with a Sena woman, Gala, whom he wooed but who rejected his advances because she had been promised to a well-connected man from her village. He was the proverbial `mzungu`, who also earned the admiration of the locals because of his dexterity and fearlessness in handling all kinds of reptilian creatures found in the region, which also feature in the tale.

So forty years on, he goes on a quest to fulfil a dream that he had allowed to possess him, of returning to a lost paradise. He arrives in Malawi, full of plans and good intentions. He notices that the country has changed of course. Even before he sets out on his hazardous journey into the interior, he is warned by an old English expat to expect nothing because all they want is money [and] trade goods and shiny beads, but he is not deterred. Through a tortuous route, he gets to Malabo at last. Word had already reached there about his coming: They knew of the mzungu at Malabo, they said. They had heard stories about him.

The village people welcome him - treat him like a big man, a potential benefactor. He stays, gets into a settled mode of life there. They provide an adolescent woman to take care of him, to cook and clean and attend to his needs. They accord him the status of an honorary tribal elder, and observe all the social conventions at first. He even meets his erstwhile object of desire, Gala, also as aged as himself, and begins to feel at ease, even though she too hints at trouble to come.

Then the expected quid pro quo begins to bite. He is forever forking out bits of cash to all and sundry around him, for things they want to buy or say they need. His health suffers and he becomes seriously ill. There are all kinds of misunderstandings and mishaps. Familiarity breeds contempt. The hunger of the people, the poverty of their bare existence, the nothingness of the place, the harsh and unyielding landscape and its isolation and, above all, their greed and general untrustworthiness - all these negativities mount and he feels trapped.

He languishes in their captivity. He who had come to do good, finds himself ensnared in their machinations and demands. He makes an unsuccessful attempt to escape from their clutches, but it is cruelly thwarted. In the process he is confronted by a dubious collection of a foreign aid agency`s operatives, apparently in league with the village headman who has turned against him. He knows that he will last only until his money runs out, after which his fate is damned. He has lost track of time and has no means of reaching the outside world. His only salvation lies in his being able somehow to send an SOS message to the American consul in Blantyre. He longs to be rescued, to return to his mundane but safe abode back in Mystic River, thousands of miles away from the lowliness of the Lower River!

The plot is even more complicated than this, as is the characterisation and the physical setting of the narrative. Theroux has threaded all this with his customary simplicity and directness of language. And the moral? The returning post-colonial Tarzan is a much diminished figure, not to be feared or pampered nor to be obeyed or respected except as a giver of money and handouts. They latch on to him because he has ventured into their midst, their territory, and so has to abide by their terms. The tables have turned, and the natives have become his master!

RAMNIK SHAH
© 2012
Surrey England

(Note: a condensed version of this review appears in the July 2012 edition of the Nile Journal at www.nilejournal.net)

"The Other Barack" reviewed

The race for the office of US president is now truly under way. It is of course a matter of universal concern, because of the global reach and impact of American power, even if the rest of the world has no say in who gets elected to that office because the democratic principle does not transcend national boundaries.

Even so, for Kenyans in particular (and others in the neighbouring countries) the forthcoming US election will resonate for the same reason that the last one in 2008 did. Then they were overjoyed with vicarious pride when Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. After all he bore, bears, the name of his Kenyan father; so Kenya will always be associated with American history right at the top. As if that wasn`t enough, he had even enshrined this connection in a best-selling autobiographical work with a catchy title that focused on his father`s legacy, while he was still on the make as a national figure, since transformed into an international statesman. But despite all expectations and exhortations, he has eluded making a return visit to Kenya in the years that he has been in office and now, as he embarks on a gruelling bid to be re-elected for a second term, it is most unlikely that he will do so any time soon.

And why? The answer may well lie in `The Other Barack`, a riveting and lucid biography of the older Obama by Sally H Jacobs, a veteran journalist on The Boston Globe, published in America last year, with the telling sub-title: “The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama`s Father”. That neatly sums up Obama Sr. Bold and reckless he certainly was but, more than that, he comes across as a deeply flawed character, in stark contrast to the idealism and romantic appeal of his son`s `Dreams From My Father`. Is it possible that President Obama wishes to put a distance between him and his late father, not necessarily to repudiate his ancestry but rather to give himself time to reappraise their relationship in the light of what he himself has gone through and may have learnt in the intervening years! Well, if so, this book will certainly give him, and the reader, much to ponder.

Obama Sr was an enigma even to his contemporaries. I knew him in the mid-1960s and wrote about it in `AwaaZ` (Issue 1, 2010; http://www.awaazmagazine.com/index.php/archives/item/136-barack-obama-an-accidental-mwananchi), a cultural magazine published in Nairobi. My acquaintance with him was as an occasional drinking companion. He was a very private person, who never let anyone get close to him. But even then it was clear that he was a larger than life figure. In retrospect, we can only judge him by his actions. These, alas, do not always reflect well on him.

In the very first chapter, Jacobs lays bare the character of `The Old Man` in unambiguous language, in terms of “the skein of lies and half-truths he had woven” about his “chaotic life”. What is revealed, as the book goes on, is not pleasant. As a foretaste of things to come, Jacobs points to the sombre realisation of his father`s shortcomings in President Obama`s `Dreams`: how “he had made the painful discovery that his father had not been the towering success that he had been led to believe as a child”. Was he already a fallen idol? Had he known his father as an adult might his `dreams` not have turned into a nightmare?

Jacobs has meticulously researched and documented Obama Sr`s complex antecdents, and relatively short but hugely chequered life. Above all, what comes across with vivid verisimilitude is the older Obama as a dandy and a bombast, who hid his fundamental frailties and failures behind a booming voice and an arrogant, intimidating posture.

His boasts of academic achievements were hollow. He never gained the much coveted PhD from Harvard, from where he was forced to leave and return to Kenya prematurely, despite which he styled himself as `Doctor` and claimed to be “one of the best economists in the country”!

His one memorable contribution to public discourse was in the form of an eight-page piece in the East African Journal in 1965 in which he critically challenged the conceptual framework of the government`s Sessional Paper No. 10 on `African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya`. This was the brainchild of Tom Mboya, who was already lining up to be a potential successor to Kenyatta, in opposition to the left-leaning Vice-President Oginga Odinga. Obama Sr derided the authors of the document for failing to define African socialism and seeking to perpetuate a neo-colonial agenda dependent on foreign capital and for not addressing the structural socio-economic disparities in the system. He was thus questioning the wisdom of state policy. It marked him out as a trouble-maker, and after Odinga`s break-up with Kenyatta and the formation of the Kenya People`s Union, he found himself largely hung out to dry as a disgruntled critic.

His pretensions of a brilliant professional career too were an exaggeration for, according to Jacobs, he never rose above the level of a middle-ranking bureaucrat. His employment history was littered with one episode after another of inappropriate behaviour, overbearing conduct, exceeding authority and even impersonating his own boss. Following a stint as a Shell executive, his first job after returning to Kenya, he joined the Central Bank of Kenya, only to last there for nine months. He was then appointed to the Kenya Tourist Development Corporation in a senior position but was fired from that, also on account of repeated acts of misfeasance. After a spell of unemployment that cost him both his dignity and purse, he persuaded Mwai Kibaki, then the Minister of Economic Planning, to give him a job at the Ministry. It was to be his longest and most productive, albeit marred by drink and quirkiness, and lasted from November 1975 to November 1982, when he died in a predictable car crash, aged 46.

His personal life was a catalogue of drunken excess and misadventures, sexual proclivities, financial crises, motor accidents involving death and injury, marital abuse and violence towards his (second) American wife Ruth, misanthropic tendencies and, above all, failure to connect with almost all his children, wives and mistresses on an emotional footing. If he did struggle with his inner demons, he never let it show. How was it that the promise and potential that he had projected or others had seen in him early on remained unfulfilled?

His background provides the clue. Jacobs has done a remarkable job of tracing the family history of the President`s father, stretching back to several generations, given the paucity of documented records and considering that she had never been to Africa before. We are treated to a colourful portrait of Obama Sr`s father, Hussein Onyango. His lowly status and incarceration under British colonial rule, and his Islamic cultural traditions, clearly shaped his stern character, which in turn was to influence Obama Sr.

We learn that at age eleven, the older Barack walked out of his primary school because “[h]e was a man, he declared, and he was not going to be taught by a mere woman who could not possibly have anything to teach him that he did not already know”! His father enrolled him in another primary school, where he did well, even though his inquisitive nature and resistance to discipline did get him into trouble. From here he was accepted into Maseno School near Kisumu. That put Obama Sr into the elite league, for it was of course one of Kenya`s oldest educational institutions, whose “roster of attendees … included some of the most sterling names in Kenyan history”, such as Oginga Odinga, Bethwell A Ogot, and Achieng Oneko.

As Jacobs tells us: “Into this highly regimented academic training ground came the teenage Obama. Muslim by birth, contrarian by nature, and survivor of a tumultuous youth, he was a problematic fit”. And so he proved to be: rebellious, disobedient, resentful of authority! Despite his fine intelligence and intellect, he did not endear himself to the principal, who did not take kindly to an unsigned letter of complaint about conditions at the school which seemed to bear all the signs of his authorship. The principal`s reaction was to bar from going on to the next stage of his schooling which would have enabled him “to obtain the Cambridge School Certificate … to apply for college” and beyond that to higher education abroad. His father was so enraged that he beat him hard with a stick and despatched him to Mombasa to earn a living and “learn the value of education now”.

In Mombasa he did not fare well as a junior typist and quarrelled with his Arab employer. He next tried his luck in Nairobi, where he had friends from his school days. Soon he again secured a clerical job, “this time with an Indian law firm”. This was in 1954, when Mau Mau was at its peak. It was during this crucial period that he met Tom Mboya, who was already rising to prominence. “The two men would develop a friendship, drawn to one another by their deep ethnic roots and rapidly developing political passions. They were both excellent dancers ... twirling across the dance floor to the guitar bands that were popular ... sport[ing] a highly polished Western appearance ... the tailored poise ... so artfully cultivated ... [sharing] a certain haughtiness, off-putting to others but a characteristic that apparently echoed positively between the two of them”.

Obama`s dancing prowess and socially domineering persona were to remain deeply embedded in his character. Jacobs gives a detailed and fascinating account of this phase of his life. He “somehow managed to get a Cambridge School Certificate”, albeit in the third division, and with the help of Elizabeth Mooney, an expatriate American Christian charity worker dedicated to improving the literacy standards of the colonial era African Kenyans, got admission to the University of Hawaii and secured funding to go there as part of the airlift of African students organised by Tom Mboya and Dr J Kiano in the fall of 1959. (He had by then been married under customary law to his first wife, Grace Kezia but, as Jacobs informs us, the question of when that marriage was dissolved was only finally resolved by the High Court in Nairobi in 1989, well after his death).

It was of course in Hawaii that he was to meet Ann Dunham and marry her while she was pregnant with their son who was to become the 44th President of the USA. But Obama Sr left them and moved to Harvard. Here too, his womanising got him into trouble and aroused the ire of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service who had long suspected his marriage to Ann to have been bigamous and told him to leave the country after Harvard University had withdrawn its financial support for him. And so he had to return to Kenya in July 1964, without completing his PhD.

This is a bare outline of Obama Sr`s extraordinary trajectory from humble beginnings to a failed intellectual, a rotten husband and an absent father. If in today`s parlance, he turned out to be a traditional African male chauvinist, then that surely was a trait inherited from his father! But did he not possess any redeeming qualities? Yes, he was generous when he had the money, and took his social obligations, especially towards his large extended family, seriously. His own brother Sayid had a more rounded view of him, as quoted by President Obama in Dreams :

“This is what made my brother such a good man, these things [referring to giving free rides to people waiting by the roadside for transport]. But I think also that once you are one thing, you cannot pretend that you are something else. How could he be a matatu driver, or stay out all night drinking, and also be writing Kenya`s economic plan? A man does service for his people by doing what is right for him, isn`t this so? Not by doing what others think he should do. But my brother, although he prided himself on his independence, I also think that he was afraid of some things. Afraid of what people would say about him if he left the bar too early. That perhaps he would no longer belong with those he`d grown up with”.

Further down the chain, how much of Obama Sr`s character and personality can be seen reflected in the President? Suffice it to say that, on a pragmatic assessment of what is in the public domain and of what we can surmise, the President is a solid, self-possessed, controlled individual who does not display any of the egregious, wanton, self-destructive qualities of his father and upon whom the cultural influences of his mother and US upbringing far outweigh his genetic inheritance. He is the opposite of his father, "The Other Barack"!

© Ramnik Shah 2012
Surrey, England

(Note: a shorter version of this review appears on the June 2012 edition of the Nile Journal at http://nilejournal.net/art/entertainment/The-Other-Obama
under the title London Notes: The Other Obama)

"Shiraz" with the Sabri Ensemble

Shiraz was made in India in 1928, during the silent movie era. It was the second of a trilogy of films, the result of a unique artistic partnership between German director Franz Osten and Indian actor/producer Himansu Rai. Its showing at the Purcell Room in London`s South Bank complex on Thursday 12 April was accompanied by music performed by the Sabri Ensemble; hence the title of the programme, which turned out be a truly enchanted evening!

Shiraz is yet another variant of the Taj Mahal story - an imaginative reconstruction of the historical epic. The opening sequences, though shot in black and white, are eye-catching and pulsate with excitement and possibility, reminiscent of an old-fashioned western: a horde of camel-riding bandits split into a pincer movement to attack a royal party on horseback and cause havoc. After they depart, a gentle countryman comes along and finds a crying infant, who happens to be of noble blood, lost and abandoned. He takes her home to his wife and son and gives her the name Selina. The son of the family, Shiraz, and Selina grow up closely together and he falls in love with her as she turns into a beautiful young woman. She is then kidnapped by slave-hunters and sold to Prince Khurram, destined to become the Mughal Emperor (Shah Jehan) of India, who too falls in love with and woes her. That leads to court intrigue and to a clever ploy by a jealous princess (Dalia) to smuggle Shiraz, who had been relentlessly searching for Selina, into the palace compound so that the Prince might find him and Selina together in what might be construed as a compromising situation. That does happen but Dalia`s cunning is eventually exposed, though not before the surrounding misunderstandings lead to Selina`s near banishment and Shiraz being condemned to die under an elephant`s foot, only to be reprieved at the last minute when all the mystery, including that of Selina`s provenance and trajectory, is solved. She and the Prince then do marry, with much fanfare, and live happily together but Shiraz continues to pine for her. Years pass and then Selina dies, leaving her loving husband, the Emperor, desolate and grieving. He orders a lasting monument to be built in her memory, for which the lonely and forgotten, and by then blind Shiraz`s design is chosen. When the magnificent structure is completed, the Emperor is ecstatic and calls it the Taj Mahal, but he directs the architect to be blinded so that he might never create another one of its kind. Again, the truth about Shiraz`s involvement and condition is revealed and the tale concludes with the Emperor humbly acknowledging that the Taj Mahal is a symbol of both his and Shiraz`s love for Selina.

This simple operatic plot line, woven beautifully and effortlessly through action and captions, was augmented by the musical accompaniment of the Sabri Ensemble. While the story flowed seamlessly, their performance enhanced and heightened the experience, supplying subtlety and sentiment to the silent speech, which one could only guess at, because the subtitles didn`t always transcribe all that was said exactly but rather provided the narrative thread. The music was a delightful mixture of Indian and western sounds and themes, with a range of instruments (the tabla, piano, viola, flute, sitar and tanpura percussion strings) and concentrated vocal singing, all expertly and energetically rendered by members of the ensemble during the entire show. We were thus immediately transported into the period and the setting both by what we saw on the screen and what we heard from the musicians. And so our suspension from disbelief remained complete until the end.

Shiraz was a joint German/Indian/British production, with all the acting parts played by Indian actors. In Germany it was called "Das Grabmal einer grossen Liebe" (The Tomb of a Great Love). According to a contemporaneous review of the film in the New York Times (NYT) of 12 March 1929, Rai (who played Shiraz) was an Oxford graduate, with an accomplished track record in film production, and Enakshi Rama Rao, who played Selina, was a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Madras. The part of Dalia was played by Seeta Devi, described by the NYT as looking like a Eurasian, no doubt because of her sharp features and lighter complexion, probably a novelty to the NYT, which also informed its readers that they could "learn of the Hindu customs of past ages” from the film, presumably because its entire cast was Hindu! The role of the Emperor was played by Charu Roy. All the acting (including that of the minor characters) was superbly nuanced and assured. Equally, the camerawork graphically conveyed the atmosphere and beauty of the desert scenery and the palace and its grounds, notwithstanding the absence of colour!

Shiraz, then, is undoubtedly a film classic, though regrettably not as well known as it should be, even if at the time it did travel far across the globe judging by the NYT review. It now does the rounds of international film festivals, such as San Francisco in 2002 and Sydney in 2003. The print shown at the South Bank was extremely well preserved, without jerky movements or any discernible editing cuts. One can only hope that it will endure and be shown around the world for many more years to come.

(With thanks to Dr Asma Sayed of the University of Edmonton, Canada, for drawing my attention to the NYT review).

RAMNIK SHAH
(c) 2012
Surey England

Visiting Dubai and Muscat

So I went to Dubai after all! This was for the 4th biennial GSA Conference last month. I had previously expressed some misgivings about the organisers` choice of this UAE state as the venue, based on my understanding of its institutionalised inequalities in terms of gender, race and nationality. I then changed my mind, rationalising that these issues were common to many other societies and that in any case one had to visit the country to see it for oneself.

I am glad that I did so, because the reality proved to be quite different, and while we do hear and read about exploitative treatment of Indian and other foreign workers at the bottom end of the economy, it affects a relatively small number of people and involves a complex interplay of external and internal factors. These poor folk remain largely invisible. On the plus side, Dubai is a cosmopolitan phenomenon, where people of all races, colours and cultural and religious backgrounds intermingle and run the country`s economy and institutions at all levels with a super-efficient service ethos.

So what does Dubai have to offer? It is a booming place. What strikes the first-time visitor is its ultra-modern infrastructure – in terms of roads, buildings, public transport and utilities, communication systems, hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, entertainment complexes, leisure and tourism facilities. Add to this the sunny climate, the beaches and open spaces, the easy navigability of movement across the vast urban spread of the city and its surrounding countryside. All this adds up to a veritable paradise on earth! Well, that is the overwhelming impression. But then Dubai is like so many other centres of passing fancy across Asia - Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok – transit cities where thousands of tourists stop over for 3 or 4 days en route somewhere else, because these are basically Eastern versions of cities of the West where one gets the best of everything at affordable prices and more importantly without having to negotiate `third world` like poverty, squalor and overcrowding. Like its other Asian counterparts, Dubai is also of course a centre of international business and investment, even though it too has suffered from unfulfilled excessive expectations and even diminishing returns in recent years.

This then is the appeal of Dubai, both to westerners and those from Asia, Africa and other parts of the Middle East. More particularly, it is the modern day metaphorical mecca for Muslims from Pakistan and other parts of the Islamic world - because it has everything that America and the west in general can offer, even more. It means they do not have to travel to faraway America or Europe where they often face humiliating treatment, are subjected to discrimination and suspicion and generally made to feel unwelcome, when they can enjoy the same or even better standards of material comforts and shopping for high quality goods and merchandise in internationally well- known chains and stores in their own backyard?

And as for eating out, Dubai has an infinite variety of fast and gourmet food outlets in clean and classy restaurants, cafés and international food-court areas of malls where service with a smile by obliging waiters and other staff is the norm. So why go to America or Europe if they can enjoy the feel - the glitz and glamour – of those places and the benefits of western technology and engineering at a much lesser cost and on their own terms as to comfort and convenience? On the cultural front too Dubai can boast of art galleries, museums, theatres and cinemas of an international orientation.

I was there for only two nights and three full days and, away from the busy conference schedule, was fortunate to be taken around, in the company of a dear friend and her daughter who were also attending the conference, by an acquaintance of theirs from London who, with her husband, has made Dubai into a home away from home while they are engaged in business there. So we were able to look at many tourist sites at close quarters. We even managed a ride on the metro and to get up to the top of the famous Burj Khalifa Tower, the tallest building on earth, with a magnificent 360 degree night view of the city from the observation deck.

Of course one cannot but be struck by the fact that the place is run by foreigners. Taxi drivers, hotel and restaurant staff, shop assistants, security personnel – these are the visible faces but behind the scene, the vital levers of the economy too are in the hands of people of many different nationalities, South Asian, Phillipino, African as well as European. For me, it was a pleasure to spot several from East Africa – hotel receptionists, airport ground-staff – with a few words of greetings in Swahili.

But what about the interaction between the difference segments of the population? They obviously seem to have an unwritten code of behaviour and status that ensures that non-Arabs do not encroach upon the preserve and privileges of the locals, who in turn tolerate, even respect, the presence of the foreigners so long as they know their place. The reality of who owns the freehold is in not in contention. Within these well- defined parameters, they get along fine. There are no restrictions on what women or men, for that matter, can wear and so they can be seen in a whole global range of attire, from western to middle-eastern to Indian to oriental, with or without head-coverings of any sort. In that respect, Dubai is no different from Paris, New York, London, Mumbai or Nairobi. Alcohol too is freely available and consumed in public.

Then on to Muscat, the capital of Oman, for a couple of days. Oman of course has a long historical connection with both India and the coast of East Africa - Zanzibar in particular. It is also different from Dubai. It does not have the outward affluence of Dubai, or its none-too-disguised westernised life-style and ambience. It is also less dominated by foreigners in the public domain, even though they perform a valuable role in the country` s economy and service spheres.

What was so noticeable was that the women, though dressed in traditional style, exuded a high degree of self-confidence and agility. Very few were completely covered from head to foot; most had open faces and were not shy to look at men. I was told that this was due to Zanzibari influence that came in with the tide of refugees from Zanzibar after the revolution of 1964 there. There is also a higher degree of literacy among the women than probably elsewhere in the Gulf region. More particularly, the Sultan is an enlightened, liberal ruler who is quietly engaged in modernising Omani society without upsetting the status quo. So again, while a significant part of business enterprise is controlled by foreigners (Indian and Western) the social fabric of the country remains distinctly Omani.

Another noticeable feature of the public face of Muscat is the pristine whiteness of its buildings. Local bye-laws ensure that all properties have to be properly maintained in terms of external appearance. There were no buildings with peeling paint or other signs of dis-repair. The Sultan`s palace is a modest affair, approachable without any undue obstructive security.

The foreigners have their own communal centres, clubs, mosques, temples, churches and schools. As in Dubai, so in Muscat, the different sections of the population mix and mingle, or not, as they wish. The open question is what will happen after the present Sultan goes, but that is still a distant prospect.

And so, I feel a little more enlightened and educated about Dubai and Muscat, less inclined to write them off, than before. I am glad I went there.

RAMNIK SHAH
(c) 2012
Surrey England