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

My review of 2011

As usual, here is a record of my activities during the year, as it draws to a close.

BOOKS

1) "Sister" by Rosamund Lupton - ISBN 978-0-7499-4201-4 - piatkus p/b – © RL 2010 - 375 pp

By an extraordinary coincidence, I began to read this just as the horrendous murder case of Jo Yeates hit the headlines around Xmas. (The investigation was still continuing around 10 January when I finished reading it. Then, after a number of false starts, the murderer was caught, tried and convicted before the year was out). It has a certain resonance with the plot of this novel - beautifully narrated, utterly captivating, with minute detail and an all-pervasive psychological undertone - and keeps the reader guessing even as the final denouement unfolds – a truly magnificent first novel by a promising author.

2) "House Rules" by Jodie Piccoult - ISBN 978 0 340 97908 2 - Hodder p/b – © JC 2010 - 603pp

A gripping plot, superb characterisation and hugely instructive about what it means to have a growing autistic teenager with the Asperger`s strain, a form of mental disorder. One is trans-ported into the complex world of the single parent struggling to bring him up together with a `normal` younger brother in all its minutiae of daily living and struggles, with the overarching crime scenario that engulfs them all. The legal technicalities of the trial are explained well but the ending does not somehow quite fit into that jigsaw. By that time, after nearly 600 pages, perhaps the author did not quite know how to wrap it all up?

3) "A Bend in the River" by V S Naipaul - no ISBN - first published by Andre Deutsch 1979 - Penguin p/b 1980 – © VSN 1979 - 287 pp

Re-reading this after so many years engendered a feeling of what I can only describe as acute melancholia - an ex-colonial`s lament at the advent of change, turned into a painful reminiscence, with an underlying sense of despair over loss and uncertainty. The plight of all those caught up in the moment does not even in retrospect warm the reader to them or to the situation. The mood of the period and the physical space inhabited by the characters are vividly captured and to that extent the book will always remain a source of historical reference. Found it hard to get through.

4) "The Outcast" by Sadie Jones - ISBN9780099513421 - Vintage p/b – © SJ 2007 - 441 pp

A dark, stark portrayal of a dysfunctional family within an apparently respectable social milieu of affluent Surrey in the 1950s - the depressingly overwhelming stench of macho-sadism typical of the English upper middle-class men and the helplessness of their women folk on account of their inferior gender status of that period is so pervasive and corrupting that in the end you lose empathy with the principal female characters, even those at the receiving end of physical abuse and cruelty (of which there is plenty, such as the ritual caning of teenage daughters as punishment for disobedience or other infractions, described in graphic detail).

5) "A Journey" by Tony Blair - ISBN 9780091925550 - Hutchinson h/b - © TB 2010 - 718 pp

This was my `train journey` book, finished over a period of some 6 months` commuting into London. Fascinating, revealing, instructive = in parts = not so much self-serving as a reasoned, if often smug, explanation and apologia for his `journey` across the minefield of British and international politics, even given his candid admission that he was always more interested in religion! It made interesting reading for the obvious reason that one could re-trace the various historical events and developments and reappraise them in the retrospect.

6) "When The World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years!" by Stanley Meisler – © S M 2011 - Beacon Press, Boston - ISBN 978-0-8070-5049-1 (h/b) - 272 pp

A pleasure to read, this history of the Peace Corps, with a detailed insight into its genesis and operation over the last 50 years, written by a personal friend whose voice resonated throughout.

7) "Solar" by Ian McEwan - ISBN 9780099549024 - Vintage Books p/b – © I M 2010 - 285 pp –
A disappointing read, too much narrative, too little directness in terms of characterization or dialogue; a tale of an ageing hero`s descent into moral and physical decrepitude – the pathos is reminiscent of Phillip Roth`s more recent writings.

8) "Histories of the Hanged: Britain`s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire" by David Anderson - ISBN 0 297 84719 8 - h/b - www.orionbooks.co.uk – © DA 2005 - 406 pp

Re-reading this in the wake of the Mau Mau case heard at the High Court in April and other current and recent happenings in Kenya has been a cathartic exercise almost. We had known about the abuse and cruelties, the injustices and traumas associated with the great Emergency, but the book revealed and reminded the reader of them in their stark detail. The subject is bound to be revisited again when the ruling in the case is given sometime in 2012 .

9) "blueeyedboy" by Joanne Harris - A Black Swan Book 9780552773164 – © Frogspawn Ltd 2010 - p/b - 526 pp = rubbish boring!

10) "The Confession" by John Grisham - ISBN 9780099545798 - Arrow Bks p/b – © Belfry Holdings Inc 2010 - 456 pp = a disappointing read ... off-handish and irritating narrative ...

11) "The Slap" by Christos Tsiolkas - ISBN 978 1 84887 355 1 - Tusker Ross Press p/b – © CT 2008 - 483 pp - Winner of the Commonwealth Writers` Prize 2009 - a brilliant exposition of the social mores and minutiae of immigrant life in present day Australia, more specifically that of the Greek-Aussies in various stages of assimilation into the mainstream - the force of the narrative is relentless, the portrayal of the characters and of their everyday preoccupations is so realistic as to make the reader feel more like a participant than a critical observer but the end is disappointingly inconclusive - maybe leaving room for a sequel perhaps!

12) "River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh - ISBN 978-07195-6698-5 (h/b) - John Murray- © AG 2011 - 522 pp

This is the second in the so-called `Ibis` trilogy, and sequel to the first, `Sea of Poppies` - long and rambling, after the initial excitement of meeting up with the characters who had featured in the earlier novel, one was left with a constant craving to get back to their narrative, while navigating the tortuous histories and struggles of a whole new set of characters in China of the 1830s as a prelude to the Opium Wars, which no doubt will be covered in depth in the last of the trilogy. The reader is easily led to connect empathetically with Bahram Modi, the enterprising opium merchant outreaching from Bombay to Canton. The author has, once again, drawn on a rich list of documented material to present a fascinating picture of how the European and American merchants interacted with the Chinese and how their trade relations were destined to morph into an imperialist agenda. The period setting, the physical locations and the personal relationships, these are all explored in minute and at times boring, tiresome detail. As in the `Sea of Poppies`, the use of vernacular and obscure but no doubt contemporaneously correct spelling and terminology often jars, but it does lend a certain historical authenticity and the reader must just plod along.

13) “The Other Barack : The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama`s Father” by Sally H Jacobs – ISBN 978-1-58648-793-5 (h/b) – © SHJ 2011 – PublicAffairs NY – 295 pp

A fascinating, riveting, frank and penetrating portrayal of Barack Obama Senior. A separate review which I had begun still remains unfinished, but the impetus for it has now waned in light of Jackson Lears` piece in the LRB (Vol 34, No 1) due out on 5Jan 2012.

14) “The Executor” by Jesse Kellerman – ISBN 978-0-7515-4029-1 – © JK 2010 – Sphere p/b – 482 pp = a gripping literary thriller.

15) “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes – ISBN 978024094153 – © JB 2011 – Jonathan Cape h/b – 150 pp = simply superb – can relate to both its theme and period – surely should win this year`s Booker Man prize? (That`s what I wrote at the time I made this entry soon after finishing the book, and a month or so later, Julian Barnes did win the Booker!!).

16) “Our Kind of Traitor” by John le Carre – ISBN 978-0-141-04916-8 – © D Cornwell 2010 – Penguin p/b – 388 pp = a disappointing holiday read – about the Russian mafia and MI5 – starts well but then fails to engage the reader and loses the plot, as it were. This was one of the two books I took on my holiday cruise and to that extent it did the trick.

17) “The Cat`s Table” by Michael Ondaatje – ISBN 9780224093613 (h/b) – © M O 2011 - Jonathan Cape London - 287 pp = about an 11 year old`s first voyage across from Ceylon to the UK in the early 1950s – an imaginative fictional recreation of the author`s own passage – poetically evocative and nuanced – with detail and atmosphere graphically recalled from a child`s perspective, richly spiced in retrospect in terms of time and space – my other holiday book.

As usual, this has been an eclectic collection, though once again I wish I could have chosen better. Early in December however I began my research and preparation for the paper (for the GSA Conference in Dubai in February) on Naipaul and Theroux. And so I am currently immersed in their literature about India and the Indians and in biographical or critical works about or by them. This means having to reread and reappraise such familiar works as `An Area of Darkness`, `India: A Million Mutinies`, `India: A Wounded Civilisation`, `The Mimic Men`, `Sir Vidia`s Shadow` and `The Great Railway Bazaar` plus a few others.

Reading has thus remained a compelling passion, to be engaged in mainly as a night-time bedside activity, except for research and writing book reviews etc.


FILMS, PLAYS, CONCERTS etc


1) Sat 1 Jan - Odeon KT1 - "The Way Back"

2) Sun 2 Jan - NFT Studio - "Winter`s Bone"

3) Sun 9 Jan - Odeon KT1 - "The King`s Speech"

simply brilliant - one was drawn into the plot, the characters & the history as it unfolded - not overdone in any way - superb acting and direction - surely an Oscar win? (That`s what I wrote immediately after seeing the film – and of course it did win the Oscar).

4) Sat 15 Jan - Epsom Church Concert (Franshawe`s `African Sanctus` + other items)

5) Sun 16 Jan - Odeon KT1 - "Conviction" – can`t remember now what this was about!

6) Sun 23 Jan - Odeon KT1 - "Black Swan" – simply superb, and this too won some Oscars!

7) Tue 01 Feb - RFH - Venezuelan Brass Ensemble - Mussorgsky`s `Pictures at an Exhibition` + music from `West Side Story` + 2 other items

8) Sun 20 Feb - Odeon KT1 - "True Grit" – Enjoyable remake of the old John Wayne movie

9) Sun 27 Feb - Odeon KT1 - "Never Let Me Go"

Beautifully done; it brought the book alive. I had always wondered how the book would be translated into film – it proved to be a moving portrayal of the relationship between the three principal characters.

10) Sun 06 Mar - ICA - "Confessions" (Kokuhaku)- Dir Tetsuya Nakashima, Japan 2010-
disappointing ... too stark and unyielding ... walked out 2/3rds way - a teacher whose daughter has been murdered by two of her teenage students controls the narrative, standing before her unruly class and laying out her reasons for the revenge, which is depicted graphically as the truth behind the tragedy is revealed as the film moves inexorably between numerous perspectives.

11) Fri 11 Mar - Odeon KT1 - "Fair Game" - Dir: Doug Liman (Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame & Sean Penn as Joe Wilson – the story of the betrayed CIA operative, exposed by vindictive superiors; informative and thought-provoking.

12) Fri 18 Mar - Odeon KT1 - "The Lincoln Lawyer` - Dir: Brad Furman - disappointing, poor, probably pilot of a failed tv series!

13) Fri 25 Mar - Sth Bnk: Purcell Rm - "ShivaNova & Yasmin Alibhai-Brown" = music and reading/talk – Y A-B is always a pleasure to listen to: here she was utterly frank about her background and passage through a critical phase of her life.

14) Sun 17 Apr --do-- "Soumik Datta`s Circle of Sound" - enjoyable fusion music entertainment

15) Tue 10 May – City of London School, Senior Summer Concert

16) Fri 1 July - V&A - "Rang Rasiya (Colours of Passion)" - Dir: Ketan Mehta - London Indian Film Festival season (Q&A with Director) - about the life, works and passions of radical artist Raja Ravi Varma (modern parallel with M F Husain), a bit overdone but ok

17) Sat 2 Jul - Odeon KT1 - "The Conspirator" - Dir: Robert Redford (James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Kevin Kline etc) - Recreation of the tale of an alleged conspirator who was tried and convicted together with her co-accused of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, with the grisly scene of their simultaneous public hangings – parallel with 9/11 as far as the absence or corruption of proper legal process was concerned -

18) Thu 7 Jul - NFT1 - "That Girl In Yellow Boots" - Dir: Anurag Kashyap - Kalki Koechlin, Naseeruddin Shah, Gulshan Divaya) - R – separately reviewed in blogspot

19) Sun 10 Jul - hmvCurzon Wimbledon - "A Separation" (Dir: Asghar Farhadi) - absolutely1st rate – even at the time I thought it would win some plaudits and awards; well it has, for its intimate and graphic depiction of the breakup of a modern middle-class Iranian couple`s marriage in present-day Tehran, under the glare of the complex legal and judicial process, with a stark look at the social and class tensions integral to the plot-line; the narrative moves on relentlessly with no concessions to the western audience`s sensibilities (and why should it) – one of the two or three best films seen during the year.

20) Wed 07 Sep - ICA - "Akunin (Villain)" - (Dir: Sang-il Lee - 139 mins) - good up to the point where the villain confesses guilt, then becomes too long and soul-searching tiresome and predictable.

21) Wed 14 Sep – Epsom P/h – “The Tree of Life” (Dir: Terence Mallick) - Disappointing – too long and repetitious –

22) Sun 18 Sep – Odeon KT1 – “Tinker Tailor Solider Spy” - Dense, atmospheric, one follows the complicated plot without quite grasping it, superb acting

23) Fri 23 Sep – Rose Th KT1 – “The Importance of Being Earnest” – wanted to see how this period and peculiarly Edwardian comedy of manners would appeal to 21st century audiences; seemed dated but minimally enjoyable nevertheless; also wanted to see what the Rose Theatre looked like, ok

24) Mon 24 Oct – NFT1 (LFF) 3.45 pm - `Medianeras` (Dir: Gustavo Taretto (2011) - excellent, enjoyable … about contemporary life Buenos Aires dominated by the internet and other means of modern of communication, more particularly about one man and woman whose lives intertwine with each other though they do not meet until right at the end (QA/with Director) - Argentinian – Spanish with English subtitles - *****

25) Thu 27 Oct – NFT1 (LFF) 3.45 pm – “A Simple Life” (Dir: Ann Hui) (2011)
a heart-warming tale of the relationship between the young master, a successful film director, of a well-to-do Hong Kong Chinese family settled abroad, and their domestic maid who has served them for 60 years; what happens when she is disabled by a stroke and how he takes charge of her care and welfare; the working of the old people`s home she is placed in is captured in minute detail, as are all relationships – a very moving film sure to be recognised by critics? – Mandarin with English subtitles – SUPERB - *****

26) Mon 07 Nov – Odeon KT1 - “Tosca” – ROH production relayed live on screen of Puccini`s opera = Angela Gheorghiu (Tosca), Jonas Kaufmann (Cavardossi) and Bryn Terfel (Scarpia). Conductor: Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera = Excellent, enjoyable

27) Fri 25 Nov – RFH – LPO Concert (Edwardo Portal, Cond; Craig Ogden, guitar) = incl Joaquin Rodrigo`s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar & orchestra & Mussorgsky`s Pictures at an Exhibition orch Ravel)

28) Sat 17 Dec – QEH - `The Bollywood Trip`(Award-winning Danish director Rolf Heim collaborates with leading modern kathak choreographer and Southbank Centre Artist in Residence Gauri Sharma Tripathi. Music = composer Stephan Grabowski and band provide the musical score) – an entertaining mixture of dance, music and parody of `One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest`involving a Bollywood star receiving treatment in a Danish psychiatric hospital - enjoyable but forgettable!


LECTURES, TALKS, EVENTS etc

Wed 12 Jan - RSA 1pm: `How the West Was Lost` - Dambisa Moyo - Ch: Hugo Dixon

Moyo argued that the western world has squandered its dominant position through flawed economic policies, and must fundamentally change its game-plan to compete with the emerging world. According to her, by forging closer ties with the emerging economies, rethinking trade barriers, overhauling their tax systems to encourage savings rather than ravenous consumption, and specifically addressing the three essential ingredients for growth (capital, labour and technology) it might yet still be possible for the West to firmly get back in the race.
Q&A badly handled

Thu 20 Jan - RSA 1 pm: `The Future of WikiLeaks` - Evgeny Morozov (`Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom`) Chair: Charlie Beckett

Wed 26 Jan - RSA 6pm: `What has become of the Mother of All Parliaments` - Stein Ringen (keynote) + Zac Goldsmith, Margaret Hodge, MPs & George Parker, FT with Fiona Booth of the Hansard Society, Chair)

Thu 27 Jan - UofL Senate Ho 5.30-7pm: `India`s Elite Africans` - Panel presentation - Prof J McLeod, Dr Fooeza Jasdanwalla & Dr Shihan de Silva – Q&A/

Thu 03 Feb - RSA 1 pm: `Five Lessons From India` - Patrick French - Ch: Amit Roy Q&A/

Thu 10 Feb - RSA 1 pm: `On Nations and Nationhood` - Shlomo Sand - Ch Rosemary Hollis

Tue 22 Feb - RSA 6 pm: BBC R 4 recording of `Four Thought`, Episode 4 of 6, Ahdaf Soueif - Q&A/

Wed 16 Mar - RSA 6 pm: `The Unfinished Global Revolution` - Mark Malloch Brown - Ch Sheena MacDonald - Q&A/

Thu 17 Mar - SOAS 5.30 pm: `From the Herero to the Mau Mau: Litigating Reparations Cases for Colonial Atrocity` – panel incl Prof David Anderson on the Mau Mau case - Q&A/

Mon 04 Apr - RSA 6 pm: `A Time for New Dreams` - Ben Okri (Ch: Claire Armistad) Q&A/

Mon 18 Apr - RSA 6 pm: `Constraining Consumption` - Chandran Nair (Ch: Sir Crispin Tickell) - Q&A/

Mon 16 May - QEH 7.45pm: Francis Fujiyama (ch: Anne Mclevoy)

Tue 24 May - QEH 7.45pm: Paul Theroux (ch: Anita ?, not v good) Q&A/

Thu 09 Sep - RSA 6 pm - Ten Years After (John Gray, Lisa Appignanesi, Sarfraz Manzoor, Mehdi Hassan + James Robbins, ch) Q&A/

Thu 15 Sep – RSA 1 pm – “DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You” – Misha Glenny (Ch: John Kampfner)

Tue 20 Sep – ILPA 7 pm – Talk by Clive Stafford Smith (Reprieve) - US Death Row – Q&A/

Wed 05 Oct – RFH 7 pm – President Jimmy Carter with Jon Snow

Mon 24 Oct – RSA 6.30 pm – “British Pakistanis and Pakistan: 21st century citizenship and diasporas” (panel incl Anatol Lieven)

Tue 13 Dec – RSA 1 pm – “Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots” – David Lammy MP (Ch: Mathew Taylor, Chief Ex of the RSA)

Thu 15 Dec – RSA 1 pm: “2011 – The Year in Rhetoric” (Sam Leith; Ch: Philip Collins)

FOREIGN TRAVEL

This year we managed only one joint trip abroad (though my wife did do one on her own to Kenya in March) in October: a few days in the Lake Garda area of Italy followed by a week`s hugely enjoyable Mediterranean cruise on a Costa liner that took us to Ancona, Dubrovnik, Mykonos, Athens, Corfu, and back to Venice, at each of which stop we were able to look around or take excursions.

GENERAL

The main reason for not having travelled abroad more was that during this year we had to have a lot of long outstanding jobs done to our house, spread over the spring, summer and autumn months. We also hosted a major birthday celebration party, involving several months of preparation. So this year has been quite eventful and on the whole things have worked out pretty well.

Looking back and taking stock of everything that has happened during the past 12 months, as always it is amazing to reflect on how much has been accomplished or what one has lived through. On the literary front, I cannot now recall what had prompted me to pick up Naipaul`s `A Bend in the River`, but in retrospect perhaps it was that, reinforced by meeting and talking to my other favourite author, Paul Theroux, in May, that may have subconscious-ly led me to choose them as the subject of my paper for the forthcoming GSA Conference?
And to think that when I chose the topic and submitted my abstract, in October, I did not even know that the two of them had made up their long and bitter quarrel, which I only discovered when I started my research at the beginning of this month! As for books, the most worthy of mention were `The Other Obama`, `The Sense of An Ending`, `River of Smoke` and `The Slap`.

The most outstanding movies were undoubtedly `The King`s Speech`, `A Separation`, `A Simple Life`, `That Girl in Yellow Boots`, `Medianeras` and `Ras Rasiya`, in that order; the others, with the exception of one or two, were not that far behind either.

And as for talks etc, some of them seem so far back in time now! And yet it was less than a year ago that I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian author, whom I have always admired and whose `Map of Love` I had reviewed on the GlobalEar forum more than 10 years ago! And to think that she had come hotfoot from Tahrir Square, in the wake of the Arab Spring that had swept across North Africa and the Middle East, to speak ex tempore about its significance! The next month, in March, it was the turn of Mark Malloch Brown to talk about the Unfinished Global Revolution. Then followed Francis Fuji-yama, Paul Theroux and Jimmy Carter. At Carter`s appearance in the Royal Festival Hall, I joined the queue at the end of his talk to put a question to him, but with six or seven others ahead of me, there simply wasn`t time and I had to abandon the attempt. I knew I had a perfect point to put to him: how did he feel about the mega-power of the US, which it does not shy from flaunting and using at its will and whim?

Anyway, this then was 2011 for me. Despite other, more mundane and time-consuming, pressures and preoccupations, I have tried to adhere to a well established pattern of activities, though I have now become a little more discerning and conscious of creeping limitations! My greatest regret has been that I have not been able to update this blog more regularly or to post more material from my archives. I hope I can do more of that in future. More immediately, I am worrying about how little time I have to prepare my paper for the GSA Conference. It`s an immense task and a huge challenge. I have set myself a deadline to start writing it in ten days` time. How will I do it? Watch this space.

Meanwhile, best wishes to all who may read this for a happy and peaceful 2012!

RAMNIK SHAH
© 2011
Surrey England

"That Girl In Yellow Boots" - a review

This is a brilliant, world class film, one of the new Indian wave of independent art movies on offer during the second London Indian Film Festival - 30 June to 11 July 2001 - currently in full swing.

In the opening scenes, we see Ruth, of mixed British-Indian heritage, arrive in Mumbai from England. She goes through the rites of passage that lone foreigners setting foot in India for the first time have to negotiate, with patience and bemusement. In her dealings with minor bureaucrats and others, her Hindi helps - they all comment on it. She is looking for her long lost father who had abandoned her and her mother and a sibling when she was quite small. This metaphorical search for her inner self and identity soon engulfs her in the maelstrom of life of the city that never sleeps - a la Vikram Chandra`s `Sacred Games`!. She soon becomes a masseur in an upmarket kind of parlour, giving expert hand jobs to a motley collection of punters, some of whom do not even know that what she is offering is a `happy ending`! One however, played by the veteran Naseeruddin Shah, forms an avancular attachment to her, which she for her part appreciates.

Her private life is however complicated by Prashant, her rather feckless boyfriend, a petty criminal whose drug-dealing lands him in trouble with Chittiapa, a gangster who, aided by a bunch of side-kicks, robs her of her savings and uses sexual violence to get at Prashant. She eventually does find and make contact with her father, but it is a bizarre denouement, with an unusual twist that should shock Indian audiences into confronting the taboo subject of incest in a modern setting. The Naseeruddin character`s emotional ouburst towards the end is also an expression of despair at the moral degradation inherent in the situation.

Throughout the narrative moves along seamlessly. We get an intimate insight into both the humdrum detail of both Ruth`s domestic as her professional life. A key supporting role is that of Maya, the parlour`s receptionist, who provides light relief through her interminable one-sided phone conversations with her numerous wannabe suitors. All character performances are rendered with the right mixture of authenticity and make-believe. Above all, it is Ruth who shines, single-handedly dominating the movie from beginning to end. Her lack of sentimentality and determination to succeed in her mission sustain the essence of the plot. She proves to be tough cookie when things turn nasty.

Ruth is played by Kalki Koechlin, born to French parents in India, who is a fluent Hindi speaker in real life, which lends a natural credibility to her performance. The dual Hindi-English language of all the characters is so unobtrusively woven into the film that the English sub-titles seem to be part of its fabric. The street life and mega-cosmopolitanism generally of Mumbai is beautifully captured as an integral backdrop. This also underlines the universality of the theme, of an estranged child seeking to connect with a lost parent. Such a scenario could be transplanted to any other metropolitan setting across the globe. The director, Anurag Kashyap, who has an established pedigree in film-making in India, was present at the NFT showing that I went to, but I couldn`t, alas, stay for the Q&A. I would certainly have congratulated and complimented him for giving us a truly world-class movie. It is a pity that our mainstream cinema critics still largely continue to ignore such quality products coming from India, and when they do review them there are the inevitable references to Bollywood and a certain amount of confusion as to where to draw the line.

The only other festival film I have seen this time is "Rang Rasiya: Colours of Passion", about the life of the great 19th century Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma, another masterpiece, which I hope to write about separately later.

RAMNIK SHAH
Copyright
Surrey England

The Mau Mau saga

In the first fortnight of this month, The Times carried almost daily news reports and background articles and, most extraordinarily, a series of editorials condemning Britain`s historical wrongs and record in Kenya in relation to the Mau Mau emergency. All this was to highlight the case brought by four ex-Mau Mau detainees against the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), on behalf of British government, for damages for the torture and other maltreatment suffered by them more than 50 years ago in colonial Kenya. It was to have opened on Monday 4th April, but was delayed and eventually opened on Thursday 7th April, and ended a week later on Thursday the 14th. I should explain that the hearing was not of the case as such in the sense of a full-scale trial but rather of a preemptive application by the FCO to strike it out as a matter of law.

I had intended to attend the hearing from the beginning but in the end managed to do so only from the third day on to the last. But it was a thoroughly satisfying and stimulating experience. Since my retirement from active practice, I hadn`t gone anywhere near a court, and certainly not around the hallowed precincts of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and so it gave me quite a buzz to wander around the corridors and hallways of the complex and to be within the four walls of a modern court setting in the East Block.

And my impressions? I can only express them in superlative terms. This was the British, more specifically English, justice system at work at its best. There could be no denying the quality of excellence and expertise underlying the whole proceedings. The huge array of documents - laid out in neat folders and spread across and around the benches of counsel, solicitors, their support staff and the judge high up on his dais - were an obvious and compelling sight of the range and depth of the preparation that must have gone into the litigation. And then there was the unpretentious but undoubted professionalism of the leading players at the centre of the drama - the two QCs, Robert Jay for the FCO and Richard Hermer for the Claimants, and the judge, Mr Justice McCombe. They interacted with each other with a rapport born of a shared background and training at the Bar and, even more than that, with a mastery of their respective briefs and an understanding not only of the legal issues involved but also of the historical importance of the case. They got on with the arguments and submissions effortlessly, with no hiccups or interruptions in the flow of the narrative. There was not a single moment when counsels` presentation was marred or delayed by missing or misplaced documents or due to some mistake in the compiling or identification of the material or other unexpected shortcomings on the part of either side, as does sometimes happen in complex cases.

Basically, the FCO wish to have the case dismissed on broad grounds to do with jurisdiction, accountability and constitutionality. They argue that, even assuming the claimants` allegations of torture and other serious mistreatment meted out to them in the detention camps to be true, since these were carried out by the police, army and security forces under the command and control of a colonial administration that was separate from the UK home government, the latter should not now be held liable for those acts. I may be putting this simplistically, but in essence the FCO were / are seeking to distance themselves from what happened in Kenya more than half a century ago on the ground that the UK government is not responsible for the acts and conduct of the forces of law and order there because they were functioning under a separate juridical entity. There were also other points of distinction and finer detail that were put forward too, but this was the essence.

The way I would put it is, no matter how the imperial government chose to dress up the colonial administration of Kenya, in terms of legal personality or internal structures, the fact remained that Kenya was a colony and a colony is by definition not a sovereign state. In international law, Kenya was a British territory and it was the United Kingdom that was ultimately in charge as the governing power. Whether this line of reasoning finds favour remains to be seen.

Legalities apart, it was thrilling to be part of the attendant `circus`, so to speak. Present there were of course the four elderly claimants with their minders, though on all the days that I attended the female member did not make an appearance. Then there were those who had also come from Kenya, as well as other supporters and well-wishers. I had interesting chats with some of them and the lawyers involved in the case. There was no tension or emotion shown at any time; if anything there was a feeling of goodwill and camaraderie. It was all a very restrained and civilised affair. At lunch breaks, most of us congregated around in the main hall or the cafe, and returned to the court refreshed. Some of the visitors from Kenya took the opportunity to work around the court sittings to fit in a busy schedule of sight-seeing, interviews and meetings. At the end of the daily sessions, Richard Hermer made a point of explaining the gist of what had taken place to his client circle, his words being translated into Swahili or Gikuyu.

As the judge on the opening day had observed, it was not necessary for the claimants to have come to London in person to attend the hearing. They came nevertheless, and one can only assume that they did so on advice because of the obvious public relations angle, which had the desired effect. Their pictures appeared almost daily in The Times, and there was other media coverage too. The most sensational aspect of the whole case, from the domestic UK perspective, turned out to be the unearthing of the lost archive of the colonial administration`s papers and communications with the home government. This too was covered extensively in The Times. The Foreign Secretary was compelled to make a statement to the effect the government will now take steps to put the documents out into the public domain as soon as possible, however much they may prove to be embarrassing.

At this stage, while we await the court`s ruling, I have no doubt that whatever the outcome, the Kenyan veterans who came to London, who have put their faith in British justice, will agree that they have had a full and fair hearing. And if their case is allowed to proceed to a full-scale trial, then it is more than likely that it will be settled along the lines of what the Kenya Human Rights Commission have reportedly proposed, ie. a statement of apology and setting up of a trust fund to collectively and/or individually meet the claims of those who were wrongly detained, tortured or otherwise suffered at the hands of the British authorities during the Mau Mau emergency. We shall see.

RAMNIK SHAH
Copyright
Surrey England

My review of 2010

So here we are again, at the end of another year. 2010 however has been a mixed bag, of varying levels of enjoyment or achievement, and some disappointments too. To begin with my reading list, it has not exactly been brilliant, as I will explain later. Here it is anyway:

Books

1) "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" by Mohammed Hanif - ISBN 9780099516743 - Vintage p/b - @ MH 2008 - 295 pp

For once, I take refuge in the blurb which describes this as a "(t)easing, provocative, and very, very funny ... debut novel" and "darkly hilarious"! And so it proved to be, as a welcome beginning to the new year, and took me back to what now seems so remote, the bygone age of the madhatter General Zia ul Haq who ruled Pakistan in an ever-increasing tight dictatorship during the 1970s and 80s. The book charts the countdown to his downfall, and is laced with black humour. In the following exchanges with the officer in charge of his security, we see Zia`s obsession with personal survival which forms the basic element of the plot:

"As your Commander-in-Chief, I demand to know: who are you protecting me from? Who is trying to kill me? General Zia`s voice rose ... ". "I suspect everyone. Even my own boys. I send them back to their units every six weeks and get new ones. You might have noticed. There is no point trusting anyone, sir. Indira Gandhi, what happened?" "A shudder ran through General Zia. Indira had been gunned down by her own military bodyguards ... ".

His marital relations too had long outlived the chemistry of the boudvoir, as the following extracts show:

"His wife was standing there striking her glass-bangled wrists against each other, something women only did when they heard of their husband`s death. Later she would listen patiently as General Zia blamed his enemies in the press, pleaded national interest and invoked their thirty-eight years together. He would say everything the First Lady had thought he would. She would agree to continue to do her ceremonial duties as the First Lady, she would appear at the state ceremonies and she would entertain other first ladies, but only after kicking him ouf their bedroom".

And so the case of Exploding Mangoes is how his plane comes down in the end, but we are treated to a truly amusing and fascinating journey along the way - "witty, elegant and deliciously anarchic", to quote from the blurb again!

2) "Dead Line" by Stella Rimington - BCA h/b, CN 158346, a Liz Carlyle mystery @ SR 2008 - 374 pp

This was just light entertainment, a thriller by a past and first female head of MI5 (one of the UK`s two principal intelligence agencies). It gave an interesting insight into the working of the spy network, though with a fictional gloss.

3) "The Black Bar: Corruption and political intrigue within Kenya`s legal fraternity" by Paul Mwangi - ISBN 9966-9969-0-13 - Oakland Media Services Limited, POBox 56919 Nairobi - @ PM 2001 - 187 pp

Mwangi clearly deserved plaudits in the superlative for writing about the Kenyan legal profession as it developed after I left the country in 1974, warts and all. Earlier that year I had stepped down as Vice-Chair of the Law Society of Kenya and it was after that things began to change (purely coincidentally, with no credit or blame due to me). That funnily enough is also his starting point, for a gripping account of the ups and downs that followed. I was already uncomfortable with the changes that were taking place and had deep misgivings about what lay ahead. In any case other factors were pulling us away. But Mwangi has captured the subsequent history so well (because even at long distance, I was following the events, off and on, with regular visits back to Kenya over the next 30+ years) that the account he has given resonates with me completely. I am however surprised at the boldness and frankness, and the detail, of it all. The shenanigans of some high profile figures in the government and judiciary were familiar enough through the grapevine, but now we have it all on record and I wonder why those of them who are still around have not taken any action to protect their reputations. The book however was published almost 10 years ago and a lot of the material has already passed into the foggy and dirty history of Kenyan politics, so maybe that explains it.

4) "A Place Within: Rediscovering India" by M G Vassanji - ISBN 978-0-385-66179-9 - Anchor Can p/b 2009 @ MGV 2008 - 440 pp

As I wrote in my review of 2009, `A Place Within` was on the top of my reading list for 2010, in anticipation of meeting MGV at the GSA Conference in April at which he was to give the principal keynote address. And so it happened, on both counts. I also knew the book would resonate with me and so, again, it did on many levels. As he puts it in the Introduction: "It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit (in January 1993), to see all of India". When asked if he would visit his ancestral village, he would say no, because he didn`t even know what it was, because for him "India was the ancestral homeland, the village, if you will". There was a distinct echo here of V S Naipaul`s view of India - as of mine, typical of most second, third and fourth generation diasporan Indians - as a generic, amorphous entity that was the whole sub-continent and embraced all who were externally identified as belonging to or emanating from it. His physical discovery of this imagined space takes him across the length and breadth of the country - to the east, south, west and north - by all manner of transport, through many colourful encounters and adventures, and over a series of subsequent prolonged visits. But all the time, he was not only touching base with but also exploring his inner vision of the land of our ancestors that had been part of his (and my) inheritance - hence the `rediscovering` of the title. Again, this is a global phenomenon common to all migrant people across time and space. So for me, there was much to relate to in the book. I will reserve a critique of it as a distinct exercise in itself for another time.

5) "Curry Is Thicker Than Water" by Jasmine D`Costa - ISBN 978-0-9783793-9-1 - Bookland Press Toronto @ JC 2009 - 130 pp - a delectable collection of short stories about Indian characters and themes with such titles as The Elephant on the Highway, Egg. Two Wives and a Doormat, She Married a Pumpkin and The Guest at My Grandfather`s House, all of which give us tantalizing glimpses into the essential nature of Indian life and tradition. Of these `Two Wives` is a particularly delightful tale of two women who wreak a clever revenge on the mean and exploitative man in their lives.

6) "The Piano Teacher" by Janice Y K Lee - ISBN 978-0-00-728637-9 - Harper Press p/b @ JYKL 2009 - 334 pp - about life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation during WWII and the interaction of a range of characters who both defied and conformed to racial and national stereotypes in varying degrees; the narrative focuses on the eponymous heroine of the title who arrives in Hong Kong as an expatriate Briton in the mid-1950s and soon finds herself drawn into the lives of the survivors as their stories unfold in retrospect.

7) "Testimony" by Anita Shreve - a BCA h/b CN 158814 - @ AS 2008 - 307 pp - a passable holiday read about ranchy goings-on at an exclusive girls` boarding school in New England, the novelty of it all being that the evidence of the sexual acts is captured on videotape which then, as these things inevitably do, becomes public!

8) "Nehru: A Contemporary`s Estimate" by Walter Crocker (with a foreword by Ramachandra Guha) - ISBN 978 81 8400 050 4 - Random India p/b @ Estate of WC - 215 pp - the `contemporary` relates to the last dozen years or so of Nehru`s life during which the author, an Australian diplomat, observed him at close quarters. This then is a re-issue of the book originally published in 1966. His assessment of Nehru`s personality and preoccupation with progress was sharp and robust, but not his ruminations on India`s foreign policy under Nehru in terms of non-alignment and the emergence of a new world order based on post-colonial dynamics. Although not directly relevant to my research on the Gandhi and Jinnah paper (see below), it did provide some historical insights into the whole Indian independence phenomenon with which Nehru`s name will forever be associated, as this passage from the book showed:

"It is true that Gandhi had only fads to offer as regards the greatest problem, population pressure; but his ideas on decentralisation, on village democracy, and on what he called basic education, and on the machine, were as relevant to Indian realities as Nehru`s on industrialisation and socialism were only partly relevant".

9) "Six Suspects" by Vikas Swarup - Black Swan Book 9780552772518 - p/b @ VS 2008 - 558 pp+ - by the author of the book that was turned into the Oscar-winning `Slumdog Millionnaire` - a murder mystery set among a mix of India`s nouveau riche and corrupt politicians on the one hand and the aspiring middle and lower classes on the other, with the usual clever twists and turns of plot and a dramatic denouement.

10) "A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin" - ISBN 978 1 84668 230 8 - Profile p/b @ CM 2009/10 - 558 pp+ - a far more meaty feast than the previous one of the same length! We are treated to a close scrutiny of the working of British politics and government by a journalist and civil rights campaigner turned an MP and a Minister. His first hand account of the many familiar policies and personalities of the period covered by his memoir brought them alive.

11) "Burnt Shadows" by Kamila Shamsie - ISBN 978 1 4088 0427 8 - Bloomsbury p/b @ KS 2009 - 363 pp - this I have reviewed separately.

12) "Brooklyn" by Colm Toibin - ISBN 978-0-141-04174-2 - Penquin p/b @ CT 2009 - 252 pp - about Irish life and migration to America, and New York`s Brooklyn in particular during the 1950s; superb characterisation, but more importantly it was the universal immigrant experience that resonated most.

13) "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland) - ISBN 978 1 84724 545 8 - MacLehose p/b @ Norstedtz 2005 - 533 pp - the first of the much talked about Millennium Trilogy - riveting but also, in the end, a bit disappointing for me - not cured when I saw the movie version, with a significant variation in the ending.

14) "The Necropolis Railway" by Andrew Martin - ISBN 0-571-20961-0 - publishers details missing - p/b - 231 pp - a bit of Victoriana, a la Dickens, that exposed the underbelly of London`s seamier side that was raw and not altogether charming - one never knew about the existence of the eponymous line that literally signalled the `dead end`! The book might as well have been dubbed `Ghost Train to Oblivion` - a rather apt cue for the next item!

15) "Night Train to Lisbon" by Pascal Mercier - ISBN 978 1 84354 713 6 - @ CHVM Vien 2004 - Atlantic Bks Lond p/b - 436 pp - again a disappointing read - the promise and the potential not matched by the product. I found myself struggling to get into it.

16) "The Silent State" by Heather Brooke - ISBN 9780434020263 - Heinemann 2010 p/b @ HB - 276 pp - by a campaigning and practising journalist - a `must` read for anyone interested in the way state secrecy operates in Britain - pre-dating but in a curious way also preempting Wikileaks!

17) "A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta" by Paul Theroux - ISBN 978-0-141-04416-3 - Penguin p/b @ PT 2009 - 265 pp - one of the two books I took on our trip to India. It made a good and amusing travelling companion. In this, one of his prolific output, PT indulges in a form of sexual fantasy that seems to have become a familiar characteristic of many ageing writers - Andre Brink, Phillip Roth etc. That apart he is as robust as ever in his observation of Indian characters, and social and cultural nuances.

18) "A Week in December" by Sebastian Faulks - ISBN 9780099458289 - Vintage p/b @ AF 2009 - 390 pp - again, just the right antidote to PT`s Indian novel. The slow build-up to the climax of the party scene that brought together a motley collection of contemporary elitist Londoners - with a particular focus on the character of the second generation Muslim scion of a self-made wealthy immigrant businessman and his modernish wife who is drawn into a fundamentalist terrorist clique willy nilly - is done with clinical professional competence like a film script, though the ending is more wishful than ambiguous.

19) "The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver - ISBN 978-0571-25267-1 - Faber/F p/b @ BK 2009 - 670 pp - the most annoying book that I read during the year and for many years past. I failed to get into it, or even to understand what it was trying to tell me. The only reason I thought it might be interesting was because I had heard the author Barbara Kingsolver read from and talk about it rather eloquently at the Orange Book Prize Readings event at the South Bank earlier in the year. Of all the panellists, she was the most articulate, charming and passionate. The book seemed to make sense then, but not in the actual reading, I am afraid. Having started it, I wasn`t going to give up, but after a couple of hundred pages, I had to skip great chunks of it. The physical Mexican-American setting, on both sides of the border, during the 1930s, with Leon Trotsky as a central figure in both the literal and imaginative landscape of the narrator, was intriguing and initially attractive enough, but it was spoilt by an overdone authorial artificiality in its rendering.

20) "Seventy Two Virgins" by Boris Johnson - ISBN 0 00 719805 1 - HarperC p/b 2005 @ BJ 2004 - 326 pp - by no less than the current Mayor of London, whose baffoonish image of an upper class twit masks a truly sharp intellect, full of wit and depth. This was his first novel. Note the publication date: 2004 - when we had all barely recovered from the revelations about what had led up to the Iraq War only to be confronted with its ugly aftermath. At the centre of the novel is an ingenious and frightening terrorist plot to kidnap and hold to ransom a George W Bush-like President of the US on a visit to Britain; only the ransom being in the form of a live universal tv interactive reality show where its global audience was invited to participate by voting for or against his policies, in particular in relation to Guanatanamo. But where Johnson excels is in capturing the minutiae of all the elements of the plot as it unfolds, with a keen eye on the working of the police and security services and in his depiction of the various characters - all done with an amusing light touch and an acute sense of political realities.

...............

This is the state of play at the year`s ending. I can`t say this year`s collection, eclectic though as ever, has been appealing - far from it. The main reason for it was that during the first three and a half months of 2010, I was wholly preoccupied with research and preparation for my paper on `Gandhi and Jinnah` and delving into the subject at length. The specific works of reference in the making of that study are listed in the bibliography there. So my literary and general reading had to take second place and really didn`t get into full swing until after Easter. I had to grab whatever came handy, and so I do think my choice of books turned out to be rather poor - absymal in fact. The one to top the list was undoubtedly `A Place Within`, but it had been pre-selected anyway, while the most enjoyable were `Seventy Two Virgins` and `A Case of Exploding Mangoes`, and the most informative were `The Black Bar` and `A View from the Foothills`; the rest were just low-to-middle brow. There are, as always, unfinished books or those that I have just started. Among the former, the previous year`s `Blinding Light` and `The Divide` still remain unfinished! But among the two or three that I am currently engaged in reading is Tony Blair`s `(A)Journey`, a massive 700 page political autobiography which will occupy me for the rest of the year, as I only read it in bits while travelling by train.

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Films, Concerts, Theatre

I must say the range of these was more to my usual taste and liking - much better qualitatively than the books were. Here is the full list:

1) "Still Walking" (Arutemo Arutemo, Japanese title)) Dir by Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Japanese, with subtitles) - being always partial to Japanese movies, during the short season of them at the NFT, I greatly regretted missing the old classic `Tokyo Story`, but this was a good substitute. Its rural setting - and the moderately affluent retired life-style of elderly Japanese parents who are being visited by their grown up son and daughter with children of their own on one autumnal day - with all the dynamics of family drama, is beautifully and sensitively captured - I can still vividly picture the image of the whole family walking down a beautiful country lane at a leisurely pace - @ NFT3, 17 Jan

2) "Black Man`s Land White Man`s Country + Mau Mau" = little known archive movie documentaries of the Mau Mau era in Kenya, with historically familiar footage (to those of a certain generation) that evoked the spectre of the violence of both sets of protagonists, followed by a rather unsatisfatory Q&A and general discussion - @ NFT3, 23 Jan

3) Concert: Phil Orch. Cond V Ashkenazy - Elgar Cello Con+Tchaikovsky Manfred Symp - @ RFH, 28 Jan

4) "Late Autumn (Akibiyori) - Dir by Yasujiro Ozu - another in the Japanese season - an enjoyable comedy of manners - @ NFT3, 31 Jan

5) Play: "I Am Yusuf And This Is My Brother" = Amir Nizar Zuabi - a touching and evocative drama about the displacement and exile of Palestinians in 1948 - the partition scene with the cross-migration of refugees could so easily be true of so many other historical parallels - @ The Young Vic, 6 Feb

6) "My Name is Khan" - Dir Karan Johar (Shahrukh Khan, Kajol etc) - about the young Muslim migrant from Mumbai who suffers from Asperger`s syndrome and makes national waves in the post-9/11 America of Obama - a bit too long but passable - @ Odeon KT1, 15 Feb

7)"Waiting" (Drama-Poetry-Recital by Victoria Brittain: Juliet Stevenson, Wendy Jones etc) - on the plight of refugees - @ The South Bank Purcell Room, 12 Mar

8) "She, A Chinese" (dir: Xiaolu Guo author of `A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers`)@ ICA, 18 Mar

9) `Encounter` - (Patricia Rozario, Veena Sahasrabuddhe) @ King`s Place - Durbar Festival - Western classical & Indian music - Mumbai born & bred Rozario is a celebrated soprano and like her compatriot Zubin Mehta a familiar figure on the Western musical scene - @ King`s Place, 1 Apr

10) "The Ghost" - (Dir: Roman Polanski; Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan) - ghostly encounters, atmospheric, overpowering! @ Odeon KT1, 18 Apr

11) "Class Act 2" - City of London Freemen`s School production @ Dorking Halls, 29 Apr

12) Concert - Philharmonia (Cond: K Karabits) - Bernstein (Overture, Candide) Barber (Violin Conc) Prokofiev (Suite, RomeoJuliet) - @ RFH, 20 May

13) Concert - Philharmonia - Brahms Violin Conc + Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique - Cond: E-P Salonen; Violin: Khtachatryan - @ RFH, 10 jun

14) Concert - Leonard Bernstein`s Mass (Cond: Marin Alsop) - supeb stagecraft and chorus - @ RFH, 11 jUL

15) "Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl" (dir: Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal 2009)-eccentric indeed - @ ICA, 21 Aug -

16) "Mother" (Dir Bong Joon-ho, 2009, South Korea) @ ICA - what a mother would do to clear her son wrongly accused of murder - @ ICA, 22 Aug

17) "Bhutto" (Dirs Jessica Hernandez, Johnny O’Hara UK/Pakistan/US) @ ICA - a biopic of Benazir Bhutto, with news and docu footage about her background, upbringing and flowering into the politician and leader that she became - with contributions from her admirers. I had however never thought much of her; she had always seemed to me to lack real depth, unsure of her fundamental beliefs and orientation. The film merely reinforced my prejudice. All this was to resonate with me when later in the year I attended an event that featured her niece and fierce critic Fatima Bhutto in conversation with Nayantara Sahgal, a niece of Nehru! - @ ICA 26 Aug

18) `The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo` (Swedish, sub-titles) @ Epsom P/h - felt I had to see this because of all the hype surrounding the Milennium Trilogy by the author Stieg Larsson, having earlier read the book - not much impressed however! - @ Epsom P/h, 22 Sep

19) Concert - `Teresa Carre o Youth Orchestra of Venezuela` (COND: Christian Vasquez - works inc Carlos Chavez`s Symphony No 2 - Sinfonia India - Copland`s El Salon Mexico and Tchaikovsky`s Symphony No. 5 - an energetic & enthusiastic performance, esp of the last item - @ RFH, 14 Oct

20) Lff (London Film Festival): `I Am Kalam` (Ind - Dir: Nila Madhab Panda - 87 mins - 2010 @ NFT1, 15 Oct

21) Lff: `Autumn` (Ind - Dir: Aamir Bashir - 99 mins - 2010 @ Vue W/E, 19 Oct

22) Lff: "The Parking Lot Movie"(US - Dir: Meghan Eckman) 76 mins - 2010 @ NFT2, 20 Oct

23) Lff: "Dear Doctor" (Jap - Dir: Miwa Nishikawa) 127 mins - 2009 @ NFT1, 28 Oct

All the four films that I chose to see at the LFF were good to excellent, in varying degrees. The most thought-provoking was `Autumn`, about the life of ordinary mortals (Muslims) in Indian Kashmir. It is a damning indictment of the Indian Army occupation and of the denial of democracy and the rule of law to the ordinary folk of that region. It captures and conveys the utter helplessness and despair of individuals caught up in the history and politics of the region in which they themselves are now mere pawns. Their plight is a grim reminder of the brutality of the state in such situations. `I am Kalam` was of a different genre, depicting life in what was clearly meant to be an outpost of Rajasthan, where a prince and a pauper of school age, interact and substitute for each other, with the inevitable confusion of manners and sequels. `Dear Doctor` was about a fake GP in rural Japan who endeared himself to his elderly patients, with some amusing consequences. `The Parking Lot Movie` is a docu-drama about intelligent observations of the goings-on in a parking lot across from the University of Virginia in Charlottsville, a place incidentally that we visited more than 20 years ago!

_______________________________________

Lectures, Talks, Events etc

These too followed the usual pattern, of an assorted range of programmes. Here is the full list

1) 02 Feb - SOAS - Rm 116 - Book Launch of "East Indian Immigration into Canada 1905-1973" by Dr Faqir M Bhatti (Lahore Pakistan Studies Centre, 2007) Ch: Dr Werner Menski, GEMS

2) 04 Feb - RSA 1-2pm - John Lanchester "Whoops" - Chair: Luke Johnson, Chair RSA

3) 11 Feb - RSA 1-2pm - `The Rule of Law` - Lord Bingham

4) 09/10 Apr - SOAS - 3rd Biennial GSA Conference QA

5) 15 Apr - RSA 1-2pm - `Secrets, Surveillance and the State of British Democracy` - Heather Brooke

6) 19 Apr - RSA 1-2 pm - "The Tyranny of Guilt" - Pascal Bruckner, Ch: Nick Cohen

7) 13 May - RSA 6.30pm - "General Election 2010 - Action Replay" - a panel discussion

8) 26 May - RSA 6 pm - "Religion, Democracy and `Enlightenment Values`" - Ian Burumi - Ch: Matthew Taylor

9) 08 Jun - QEH 6.30 pm - "Orange Prize Readings" (Ch of Or Pr Judges: Daisy Goodwin

10) 17 Jun - Barnard`s Inn Hall - Gresham College Lecture by Richard Sorabji on Cornelia Sorabji - 6 pm

11) 25 Jun - QM-Lon Uni - "Fuzzy Law and the Boundaries of Secularism" - Prof W Menski

12) 05 Jul - RFH - Slavo Zizek - Ch: A C Grailing

13) 06 Jul - RSA 6 pm - "Talking to a Brick Wall: Why We Need a New Politics" - Deborah Mattinson + Polly Toynbee, Tessa Jowell

14) 13/14 Sep - Br Library - Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain 1870-1950 Conference = C:\Documents and Settings\Ramnik Shah\My Documents\Making Britain Conference.mht

15) 15 Sep - RSA 6 pm - `The Quest for Meaning` - Tariq Ramadan

17) 23 Sep - RSA 1 pm - `The Way We Were: Britain at the Start of the Seventies` - Dominic Sandbrook

18) 22 Oct - King`s Place - "Twin Dynasties" (Nayantara Sahgal & Fatima Bhutto in conv) = C:\Documents and Settings\Ramnik Shah\My Documents\Twin Dynasties Kings Place.mht

19) 15 Dec - RSA 12pm - "Preventing Radicalisation" - Panel: James Bartlett, Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, Hanif Qadir - ch: Matt T 　

The highlight of the year for me was the GSA Conference in April, at which I presented my paper on Gandhi and Jinnah. One was able to meet old friends and make new acquaintances. The Bharat Britain Conference too was exciting and as with the GSA one was able to connect with an important and integral part of our identity at many different levels. The trouble with such conferences is that their predominant academic orientation often prevents the experts from engaging in dialogue with the wider body of intellectuals, and they end up mostly talking to each other!

The most worthy among the other events was the talk by Lord Bingham - and to think that that was less than 11 months ago now, in the light of his subsequent death. By common consent, he was among the greatest English common law jurists of our age. Tariq Ramadan also is an immensely charming, persuasive and extremely well balanced contemporary philosopher. His talk too was most rewarding. The `Twin Dynasties` encounter between the two Indo+Pak luminaries was equally enlightening also.

Foreign Travel

This year, we did two big trips: one to Spain, France and Andorra (in October) - and the other, a more arduous one, to India in November. I have written about the latter on this blogsite separately, and about the other elsewhere.

General

I think my most accomplished achievement during the year was undoubtedly the Gandhi / Jinnah paper. It had been quite a challenge. My regular Diasporan Voice columns in the AwaaZ magazine are also a source of much professional satisfaction. Indeed, in the latest issue (No. 3 of 2010), which alas I have yet not seen, my piece brings out the marvels of metropolitan London, both historical and current. And I continue be an active member of the Editorial Board of the IANL (Immigration Asylum and National Law) Journal, to which I contribute also. Finally there is a great deal of interactive stuff on the internet that takes up a lot of time on a daily basis too. Although therefore I have one or two ideas for my next research/writing project, I am not rushing into that, as I have to be mindful of other priorities and pressures of normal living! Indeed, these are already making their mark felt, as evidenced by this year`s review, which is lacking in the sort of depth and particularlity that I would have liked. So while a a lot is going on in my life, it will not be the same as before, as I am beginning to slow down. Old age? Maybe!

PS> At least there is one thing I can do which will be less strenuous: dig out some more material from my own personal archives and repost them here - so watch this space. With best wishes for 2011.

RAMNIK SHAH
Copyright
Surrey England