Gear up folks!

Dear avid Readers,

Greetings!

Well, yesss! The time is ripe for taking a few Reading resolutions for the new year that’s almost round the corner! Oh Nooo! Not all resolutions are meant to be broken, you see! J

We’ve always had reading challenges in our respective classes, and in our own little reading groups, as well! And so, to help make our choices easier on the reading front, I’ve listed down a few ideas, to take the new year’s reading challenge in a ‘fun, fast, easy’ way!

For this vibrant endeavour, Hanna Braime’s famed reading-challenge-model has, as usual, been my ready reckoner of sorts!

Well, I’ve also designed a template on the same, to help you forward it to ardent ‘readers in need’!!!

The first one and the most practical one, is the 26-book format, which translates to, one book every fortnight! Very much an attainable goal, ain’t it?

So yup! here we go!

The ‘2019 reading challenge’

For the Reader in You

Bon lecture folks!

      1.     A book you read in school
2.     A book from your childhood
3.     A book published over 100 years ago
4.     A book published in the last year
5.     A non-fiction book
6.     A book written by a male author
7.     A book written by a female author
8.     A book by someone who isn’t a writer (think Paul Kalanithi or Richard Branson)
9.     A book that became/is becoming a film
10.  A book published in the 20th Century
11.  A book set in your hometown/region
12.  A book with someone’s name in the title
13.  A book with a number in the title
14.  A book with a character with your first name
15.  A book someone else recommended to you
16.  A book with over 500 pages
17.  A book you can finish in a day
18.   A previously banned book
19.  A book with a one-word title
20.  A book translated from another language
21.  A book that will improve a specific area of your life
22.  A memoir or journal
23.  A book written by someone from another country
24.  A book set somewhere you’ll be visiting this year
25.  An award-winning book
26.  A self-published book

'I am speaking beyond good and evil...'

Call it serendipity or fortuity, amazing providence or a delightful coincidence, when Prof. Rasheeda shared with me a few lovely quotes from her current read on Nietzsche’s Aphorisms on Love and Hate! So much for the power of a single, simple, sample share that really has the immense potential and the power to motivate us much-o-much, and as Prof. Premjith often says, ‘to read and to grow together’ as fellow academics in the vineyard of literature!

And yesss! quotes from authors have been italicized, as always!

Well, Nietzsche’s Aphorisms on Love and Hate from which Prof. Rasheeda happened to share a few delightful thoughts with me, have something so striking about them, in that, Nietzsche takes - albeit by their ears - some of the core dogmas and doctrines, principles and precepts, creeds and credos that are supposedly, and arbitrarily, the basic givens of our existence - effectively masked behind a veneer or a facade of objectivity - and then proceeds to destabilize them or, rather, tends to bring out the inherent weaknesses in those moral principles, nay prejudices of the great philosophers of the past!

These Aphorisms per se, are culled from an impactful read of Nietzsche, titled, Human, All Too Human, most aptly subtitled, A Book for Free Spirits!!!, a book that’s been much discussed in our classes on Poststructuralism!

Indeed, the ‘Free Spirits’ alluded to here, are the souls, who have the potential so innate within them, to look beyond and beneath the ‘moral’ worldview imposed on them by society, as these moral views or standardized normative ways of seeing, are in fact, expressions of our will to power, where we automatically tend to declare our particular, or rather ‘prejudiced’ perspectives on reality to be the most objective claims to truth-hood!

Free spirits, therefore, are souls, who see ‘reality’ as something that lies beyond these competing wills, which in consequence, helps free themselves from the bigoted minds and prejudiced, opinionated minds and thereby helps them to think beyond these constraints and constrictions!

Giving you a couple of excerpted passages from the book, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits that’s a sampled exemplification of his arguments!

Here we go!

The lie. Why do men usually tell the truth in daily life? Certainly not because a god has forbidden lying. Rather it is because, first, it is more convenient: for lies demand imagination, dissembling, and memory (which is why Swift says that the man who tells a lie seldom perceives the heavy burden he is assuming: namely, he must invent twenty other lies to make good the first).

And then follows the lovely quote shared by Prof. Rasheeda –

Intellect and morality. One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.

Well, to understand the import of this delightful maxim by FN, it’s necessary to flip back the pages to the impactful preface of this book, a book that gives expression to his notion of the will to power, and postulates a transcendence that’s beyond the bounds of conventional, morality.

Over to the Preface –

Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception-but wouldn't you know it? Here I am, beginning again, doing what I have always done, the old immoralist and birdcatcher, I am speaking immorally, extra-morally, ‘beyond good and evil.’!

Thus I invented, when I needed them, the “free spirits” too, to whom this heavyhearted-stouthearted book with the title “Human, All Too Human” is dedicated. There are no such “free spirits, were none-but, as I said, I needed their company at the time, to be of good cheer in the midst of bad things (illness, isolation, foreignness, sloth, inactivity); as brave fellows and specters to chat and laugh with, when one feels like chatting and laughing…

"If you watch the movement of a bird on the wing, see the beauty of every movement of the sky... - JK

(Well, on a personal note, this post comes quick and fast, a kinda back-to-back-blogpost in the series, thanks to some wonderful motivation, cute comments and valuable suggestions by a fab four – Mr. Shaji, Ms. Sharon, Ms. Priya, and Mr. Dinesh! Thank you much for your mails, and your messages, that real egged me on and proved the spur to burn my midnight oil and do this post at the fag end of this year! Love you guys! Keep rocking y’all!)

Myriad Responses to Beauty in Literature – III

Beauty has always been twin sisters to truth since time immemorial, and this aspect of its harmonious coexistence has never been so powerfully exemplified as has been done by the 18^th century poets, philosophers, composers and painters!

Wordsworth is all awe, when he admits to succumbing to the charms of this beauty, the rich beauty contained within nature, in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude!

I grew up

Foster'd alike by beauty and by fear;

Much favour'd in my birthplace, and no less

In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,

I was transplanted.

[from The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time]

Similarly, Hegel’s philosophy of art (that reflects to a great part streaks from off his mentorial philos, Kant and Schiller), is synonymous with a passionate celebration of beauty in art, vis-à-vis the arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry.

Art, to Hegel, is an expression of the spirit’s understanding of itself, not in pure concepts, [as does philosophy], or in the multifarious images of faith, [as in religion], but in and through objects! Such objects – be it hewn out of stone, wood, color, music, sound or words – tend to bring out this ‘freedom of spirit’ to an audience. This sensuous expression of ‘free spirit’ constitutes beauty, according to Hegel.

To put it short, Art then, to Hegel, exists, not just for art’s sake, but for beauty’s sake too!

Something akin to what Immanuel Kant exemplifies on beauty! To Kant, again, the true experience of beauty is an experience of freedom!

For more on Hegel’s philosophy of art, a very interesting primer would merit an insightful understanding to some of the postulates put forth by this philosopher of the aesthetic, written by Stephen Bungay! It’s titled, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics and it examines Hegel’s postulates on beauty and truth in such intricate detail.

Well, how elegantly, Hegel syncs here, with J. Krishnamurti’s concept of beauty!

In his profoundly insightful read, titled, Letters to the Schools, Volume 1, Krishnamurti says, One must bear in mind constantly that freedom is essential for the beauty of goodness. Meaning to say that, once freedom is lost, there is no celebration of beauty or goodness! Hence to JK, ‘love, freedom, goodness and beauty’ are one!

On the beauty-truth connect, he’s got this to say: “Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living.”

I guess, some immortal lines from JK would serve to invigorate, inspire and impact our sensibilities for the better, on his awesommy take on beauty! Here goes –

If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset. Most of us have lost touch with nature. Civilisation is tending more and more towards large cities; we are becoming more and more an urban people, living in crowded apartments and having very little space even to look at the sky of an evening and morning, and therefore we are losing touch with a great deal of beauty. If you are directly in contact with nature; if you watch the movement of a bird on the wing, see the beauty of every movement of the sky, watch the shadows on the hills or the beauty on the face of another, do you think you will want to go to any museum to look at any picture? Perhaps it is because you do not know how to look at all the things about you that you resort to some form of drug to stimulate you to see better. There.

- Freedom from the Known

Connect this with Bertrand Russell’s philosophy on freedom, in his ruminations on Education, and you have a fascinating blend there!

"There is always some beauty left..."

Beauty | in Literature – Part II

Continuing on our foray into the myriad responses to beauty in all of literature, in all its hues and shades, tints and tones, let’s enter ‘wonderland’ mode for a while, and bask in their ‘enlightening’ representments! (borrowing this phrase from Lamb!)

Well, fairy-tale retellings have always had their ‘fair’ share of admirers, well-wishers, readers and critics, who’ve loved these re-presentations or re-imaginings, for their variety, and their diverse points of view!

And the ‘Cupid and Psyche’ myth that has so impacted the story-line for its seventeenth century counterpart, Beauty and the Beast, should rather necessarily be studied and analysed from its own contextualized contours! Of course, the story would prove a grave anathema if adjudicated by today’s yardsticks on beauty in general, and gender stereotypes in particular!

In fact, many retellings of today’s time and clime have been so obsessed more with debunking the original version(s) than flaunting their retellings! (I personally feel so!)

Well, that again, forms part of a separate post altogether, that follows, sooner or later!

Amongst the 500 odd retellings thus far, (as far as i know!), I would like to single out Angela Carter’s “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” and Robin McKinley’s Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast for a little appraisal! 

The latter book, by Robin, is interestingly, her first book, and her most famous one at that, written when she was just 26 years of age! It’s for you reader, to fathom the ‘thisness’ contained within these lovely reads!

Stereotypes on beauty, engendered by cultural imperatives that are forced down the throats of gullible, unsuspecting people, have also been portrayed with gusto by a host of writers! 

One such ‘writing back’ could be seen in the short story, “Barbie-Q”, written by Sandra Cisneros! One is spontaneously reminded of Katherine Mansfield’s short story on a similar theme, titled, “The Doll’s House”!

“Barbie-Q”, from her delightful anthology titled, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Cisneros skillfully delineates the maniacal obsession of two little Latina girls for Barbie dolls, which, although innocuous on the contours, has a debilitating effect on the psyche of the coloured girls/women, as it subtly engenders or rather facilitates a tweaked, tutored and tailored normative for girls, on the sly, as portrayed by Barbie’s ‘beautiful’ blonde hair, ‘flawless’ tanned skin, and ‘ideal’ bodily proportions!

These gendered normatives, according to Cisneros, are idealized versions that play hand-in-glove to the Westocentric conceptions of feminine beauty and hence, they tend to have a very pejorative impact on the way ‘coloured’ girls get to view womanhood in general, and their own bodies, in particular! 

To Cisneros, this ‘angel in the house’ syndrome ain’t an ideal by all means, as Cisneros brings out her own point of view that, societal standards of beauty for women tend to be too idealistic and materialistic, whereas, in reality, women are otherwise, and this entails a celebration of Otherness, and difference, that goes off tangent from the Westocentric, hegemonic normative givens of life!

Cisneros thus expresses through her story about societal paradigms that portray women to be perfect and materialistic whereas in reality, women are not perfect and they do have their own flaws.

On a much-o-much similar vein, Naomi Wolf tends to call this obsession with the idealistic, flawless woman as a ‘Beauty Myth’!

In her 1990, non-fiction rave titled, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women she argues that, women were under assault by this so called, ‘exerting, punishing standards’ of the beauty myth spread over five broad areas of their lives, namely, work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger! 

These ‘perfectionistic,’ ‘idealistic’, and unattainable goals, she feels, are not only exploitative of women, but also serve to reinforce the habituated patriarchal hegemonic dictates over society.

Society’s reiteration time and again on a woman’s physical appearance makes them weaker than their male counterparts – be it in the economic, social or political spheres, she says. women weaker than men socially, politically, and economically.

Women as they grow older and older, they gradually become invisible in our culture, says Wolf.

Pointing out the double standards as in the case of the TV news anchors, she observes that, men grow older and wiser, but women are replaced when they reach 40!

Beauty for Anne Frank is real therapeutic, that makes her sustain her traumatic saga in the concentration camp! In sharp contrast to her mother Mrs. Edith Frank who has the ‘default’ tendency of focusing only on the negative shades to life and living, looking always at the ignominies and the atrocities surrounding them all, Anne is so perceptive to the love and beauty that radiates around her!

Who could ever forgot those immortal, awe-inspiring, impactful lines of Anne that have such a philosophical-ethereal import to their words: ‘I’ve found that there is always some beauty left - in nature, in sunshine, in freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.’

 

Hence to Anne, although there is misery all around, and the mind is bogged down by overwhelming calamities, she says that, she would like to focus with single-minded devotion, on the loveliness and the beauty that abides within every single human spirit!

Compare this with Viktor Emil Frankl, a miraculous survivor to the concentration camp ignominies, whose profound read, Man’s Search for Meaning (thanks to Dr. Joseph Dorairaj for introducing me to this lovable read!) has a wonderful take on the beauty of cultivating a sense of humour! 

To Victorious ‘Viktor’ who emerged alive, triumphant and unscathed from the traumas of ‘four camps’ says with gusto and conviction, “It is well known that humour, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

So much for the beauty of humour in our lives!

I remember Dr. Ganesh, our Head of the Department, at MCC, who always sports an amiable smile on him, saying, “Laughter is the dominant rasa”! And he used to add, when ‘Laughter and humour’ are your dominant rasas in life, you can face any herculean challenge right on its face!

So much for the beauty of laughter in our lives!

To be contd…

Multiculturalism and the Social Fabric! - A Review

Queen Mary’s College, Chennai has always prided itself on a host of laurels and luminaries, over the decades, - vibrant stalwarts and academics who’re shining minarets to the credo of this century-old institution!

The College has added yet another graceful feather to its cap, with the recent event of such grand proportions, that occasioned the book release of a 545-page strong intellectual treat in its Campus on 07 December 2018 at 3 pm.

The who’s who of academia had turned up in hugey numbers at the Assembly Hall, QMC to catch the D-day’s event line-up!

Hon. Ms. Susan Grace, Consul General of the Australian Consulate-General in Chennai launched the book, and a host of luminaries spoke on the occasion, including the likes of Dr. Vinod Daniel, Chair, AusHeritage, Ms. Kathleen Hosie, Information Officer, United States Information Office, Chennai, Prof. C. T. Indra, Former Prof & Head, Dept of English, University of Madras, and Prof. Eugenie Pinto, Former Principal, QMC, Chennai.

Now, I’d be doing injustice to the book, if I rob from off it, the sheen and the specifics that catapult this voluminous intellectual treat for its aura and its applause as well!

So off we go, to the specifics of this delightful book!

The book is titled, Multiculturalism and The Social Fabric in Australia, America & India, and it appeals to you right from its high-quality cover design, that’s woven into its texture myriad colours that tint, tone and adorn the effulgent backdrop to a brownish hue, with Dr. Maria Preethi’s inimitable artistic elegance agmark - attested all over!

This volume begins with a blazing bestowal of a dedication to the Queen Mary’s College and the ideals it stands for, with an impactful and eloquent quote by Miss. De La Hey, the Founder Principal of the college. It goes thus –

Here we are a large community of various castes and creeds speaking various tongues. Let each member of the community preserve her own individuality and yet draw from her studies, from her games, from her intercourse with her companions a widening comprehension of the meaning and the value of life, a deepening resolution to make her life one of usefulness, of service and of help.

Three colourful pictures prelude a perfect premiere to the profound musings contained within its fabric! Especial is a picture taken by the Editor herself, (Dr. Maria Preethi) of an Aboriginal Stencil Art on Rock at Carnarvon Gorge, Central Queensland, Australia.

Next comes the brilliant introduction to the book, that acts a mighty co-text that serves to contextualize and thereby validate the plethora of scholarly articles in the book. The 40-page introduction would indeed merit a separate study in itself, and I wish, academics who work on Multiculturalism would do well to read through this scholarly take by Dr. Maria Preethi, titled, “Multiculturalism, The Social Fabric And The Text”.

The introduction ambles up its way gently forward with a personal descriptor on the author’s tryst with the Australian multicultural landscape, that heralds the opening paragraph! Right from the restaurants that lined up the city’s (Sydney) streets, to the physiognomy of the people, to the university’s structure, comprising restaurants and students of various hues and colours, the terra firma here, in Oz, far removed from homeland, so uniquely reinforced the multicultural ethos in its ambience and its clime as well!

Perspectivising multiculturalism, the author pings on the need to look beneath the ‘cosmetic’ celebration of diversity, to have a look at the real challenges and also to appreciate/recognize/engage with the historical, political and social processes that constitute multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, to the author, is in one sense as old as humanity, and as recent as today.

Dr. Preethi then proceeds to delve deep into the notion of understanding ‘Difference’, through an insightful interview with Australian Aboriginal writer, Fiona Doyle. A similar illustration involving ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ she’s gleaned from yet another interview she did with Dalit leader Geethanandan who shared the leadership with Adivasi leader C. K. Janu in the struggle for land rights for Adivasis in Kerala.

Then follows a critique of the nomenclature, ‘Literature in India’ as a redundant, superfluous, homogenizing term, that doesn’t quite share with the realities! Citing from Raveendran, she quotes, “one cannot certainly present Indian literature as the expression of an essential Indian spirit or of a commonly shared sensibility, because the nation in question is stable only on the map of the world. Its borders keep changing from writer to writer from reader to reader and from subject to subject. This is what one is to deduce from the lack of a perfect fit that exists between the images of India appearing in, or the nations constructed by Saadat Hasan Manto, Mahasweta Devi, Gopinath Mohanty, Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, Laxman Gaikwad, Bama, VKN, U. R. Anantha Murthy and Sashi Tharoor to mention a few representative ‘Indian’ writers… These writers dwell in different Indias and to speak of them as sharing a common culture and a common sensibility is to beguile oneself.”

Next comes her interesting take on World Literature (as evidenced even today in the syllabi of courses in colleges and universities) as Eurocentric!

Thereafter follows, an intense analysis of the Social Fabric vis-à-vis Melting Pot, Salad Bowl and Mosaic, wherein all three models are said to assume a difference based on ethnicity, and preclude other types of differences.

This is followed by a description of early indigenous societies and their texts, that date human presence in Australia as being around 40,000 years ago or even further than that. Given this Aboriginal worldview, the land itself becomes a text. Similar evidence of ‘texts’ from the American and Indian perspective are also dealt with.

The silence of the Aboriginal voice in specific periods of their history, with a chronological portrayal of representative texts down the years!

Then comes up a very interesting take on the description/depiction of India as a multicultural society, and how the slogan, “Unity in Diversity” has been drummed up into the consciousness of Indians through the (state nurtured) heroic narratives of the Independence and post-Independence phase of our history.

In its elegantly posited rubric on the Multicultural ethos that governs the social fabric and the text, with reference to the three nations in their respective contexts, the Introduction proves a delightful ‘red carpet’ty ushering in, for the reader to drink deep of the wonderful papers of myriad hues that are such a relish to the heart and the mind alike!

The articles have been beautifully structured into an array of fifteen contextualized topics, ranging from

Regionality, Textuality and Intertextuality, to

Historiography, culture and tradition, to

Indian diaspora, to

Indigeneity, to

Marginality, Discrimination and Protest, to

Stereotyping, Hybridity and Hegemony, to

Gender, Human Rights and Representation, to

Ethnicity and Gender, to

Alternative Sexuality, to

Ecological Concerns and Ecocritical readings,

you have something of grandiose proportions, for every multicultural soul out here served on a captivating platter of sorts!

Published by Emerald Publishers, the book has got its elegant lustre and its sheen both on its elegant contours and on its contents as well, that makes the 'journey to the interior' - within its weave and its texture - quite a rewarding one at that!

Congratulations to Dr. Maria Preethi Srinivasan on this meticulous, marvellous and monumental work of sorts! 

We are so proud of you, Ma'm!

And to all dear and prospective readers out there, bonne lecture folks!

Myriad Musings on 'Beauty' in Literature - 1

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul. – Emerson

Ever since the Zadie Smith'ian ‘transatlantic comic saga,’ On Beauty, laid an impressive claim on my heart, I’ve been so wanting to put down some of the vibrant responses to beauty in literatures from across the world!

And well, these responses are pure subjective, and, as it oft is said, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder! Ain’t it?

So yup! Here we go!

Our Town, by Thornton Wilder is an unconventional play of sorts, written way back in the 1930s, that takes place in a small fictional town of Grover’s Corner. It is so unique in its descriptions of what ordinary people did in their everyday lives. Emily, especially, is of Wilder’s own heart and soul! Well, Emily so wishes to go back to the good ol’ past, and relive those nostalgic moments of yore yet again! But Mrs. Gibbs warns her not to go back to her past! She further tells her that it’s better to forget those past vignettes of life, and rather look ahead to life. But Emily sticks to her stand, and assures her that she’d choose to relive a happy day, and decides to pick her twelfth birthday.

Now, the Stage Manager promptly sets the scene back in time, down the decades, to 11 February, 1899. Emily now relives her twelfth birthday. She gazes at the town as it once used to be. She hears her mother’s voice calling her down to breakfast and is so fascinated at how young she looks, back then. Her father now walks into the house…. No spoilers again. So, life moves ahead so quickly, and people don’t even seem to realize this fact.

Emily now proceeds to ask the Stage Manager if human beings ever seem to realize the true meaning of life while they actually live it! He replies that, perhaps some saints or poets do. Mr. Stimson then observes that, she has learned that people go through life in utmost ignorance, blind to what’s really important – the little beautiful things in life!

Emily Webb’s final speech in the graveyard emphasizes the beauty of these mundane elements of life!

Well, from Emily, let’s now move on to our next fictional aristocratic Victorian character, Dorian Gray, the protagonist of Wilde’s only novel, and a Gothic-philo at that!

Dorian Gray’s beauty inspires, impresses and even infatuates the renowned painter Basil, that Dorian promptly becomes his highly intense and intoxicating muse!

On a delightful summer day, when Dorian is sitting for the painting, even as Basil Hallward is passionately painting away his ‘Dorian’ portrait in oil-on-canvas, Dorian happens to listen to the aristocratic Lord Henry explicating on his highly hedonistic world view, and soon he also begins to concur with Lord Henry, that beauty is the only aspect of life worth pursuing.

No spoilers though!

Although Dorian Gray seemed to have rubbed off on the sensibilities of the British publishers and the public at large, the wrongy way, way way back in the 1890s, still, Wilde prefaced a defence to his solo novel, as “the artist’s rights proper, and the probity of art for art’s sake.”

Wilde himself, commenting on the novel, said that, Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be!