'It’s as much important to understand, As it is to be understood'

Sai Shri Ramamurthy | Thoughts on an Alumna

We her teachers call her an enthusiastic kid, a vibrant kid, a committed kid, and one of the most energetic kids in town!

I am extremely delighted to do a little post on this sweet kid of ours!

Sai Shri Ramamurthy, ladies and gentlemen!

Sai Shri did her BSc in Plant Biology & Bio Technology here with us at MCC, (2010 to 2013) and I happened to be their Professor for their English paper!

One fine morning, in the year 2013, during coffee break, she came to meet us, her teachers, in the Staff Room.

‘Anna’, she said, panting, ‘Anna, could you all, come and wish my dad and mom on their wedding anniversary today. They’d be overjoyed Anna!’

‘Okay, kiddo’, we told her, and wanted her to keep it a surprise till we descended on her sweet home. :-)

And as we had promised, we five of us, her teachers, with Dr. Ganesh to lead us, and with Sai Shri in tow, made a sweet beeline to their house, much to the joy, the happiness and the pleasant surprise of her parents.

We also got there, on the occasion, the best coffee in town! She’s a coffee lover, like her father, and like us all, and she’s written down a poem on coffee too!

Such is her love for her teachers, and her parents. One reason why, she always consults with us all, whenever she ventures into anything new, be it her studies or her work or her future!

Her anthology of poems titled, Relationships was released by Dr. Ranga Narayanan and the first copy was received by our Principal, Dr. Alexander Jesudasan, on 21 December 2012. Her proud parents had also graced the occasion with their presence. [It’s exactly close to seven years now, kid!]

Her amazing anthology contains 83 poems in all! And it starts off with a loving poem for her daddy! Added, a very unique trait about Sai Shri’s poems is that, she datelines each of her poems! And she has also structured her poems quite meticulously, in a thematic order!

This particular poem on her Dad is datelined, 3 January 2012.

Daddy’s girl that she always is, the poem starts on this very personal and fond vein!

DINNER WITH DADDY

Dad is having dinner with me,

We start with soan papdi

So sweet like my daddy!

Nice vegetable rice with

Raitha cool like my daddy!

Oh, see

How he shares!

Though nothing from my plate

Goes to his,

This is exactly how it is!

Tasty dinner on the table

Best time in my time table!!

'It is my experience that great mind and great heart go together. This Scientific Magnanimity will motivate the scientific community'

Gentlemen of Science | Hanya, Atwood & Kalam

Hanya Yanagihara’s debut novel titled, The People in the Trees, which I chanced upon at Starmark, Chennai, has been sleeping for long on my bookstacks, unattended! Now, when I was working on Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, in a trice I was quite reminded of Hanya’s The People in the Trees, written almost 56 years after Calvino’s Cosimo came to have a permanent literary existence and a literary abode in our little hearts!

Well, for the 1970’s born mighty ones out there, Hanya herself is a 70’s kid! Ketto! ;-)

Hanya Yanagihara, ‘a writer to marvel at’, is a popular travel writer, novelist and editor! This, her People in the Trees is then, her debut novel.

The novel contains for the most part the fictional memoirs of Dr. Norton Perina, in such a beautiful narrative style.

Norton Perina, tells us through this, his fictional memoir that his great fascination and curiosity for science was aroused by his paternal aunt, Ms Sybil, a doctor herself!

While Norton Perina is in medical school, he gets an offer to be the medical doctor on board an anthropological team that was to go on an expedition to an island by name, U’ivu. This anthropological team is led by a person called Paul Tallent. Although the expedition is considered a dangerous mission, Dr. Norton Perina accepts the offer to be part of the team.

Under the leadership of Tallet, Norton Perina reaches the great island of Ivu’ivu. [Oh please, for heaven’s sake, forget Ghosh and his Gun Island, for now! will you? ;-)] From there they enter a still smaller island by name Ivu’ivu. [Hanya’s Hawaii connect could be gauged here, ain’t it? Well, she grew up in Hawaii!] Once they are led inside the deep recesses of the island, into the jungle, with the help of three hunters who double up as guides, Tallent tells Norton about the famous legend of the U’ivu people. 

The legend goes that, there was a lost tribe amongst them who had been gifted with eternal life along with deep stupidity on them. Quite soon they spot a woman, who is totally naked and not able to perform her functions as a regular human being. They call her ‘Eve’ and soon discover a horde of a similar tribes folk whom they call, ‘Dreamers’. One curious case about them all is that, all of them, tribesfolk sported the mark of a turtle on them all, which was an indicator that they had turned 60, although all of them were in reality, more than 100 years of age!

They notice then, the chief of the village celebrating a ritual. And in this particular ritual, he is seen celebrating his 60^th birthday, during which time, he eats up a turtle. Norton Perina’s intuition starts working overtime by now. He quickly starts connecting on the dots, adds up two and two, and surmises a curious connect of sorts between the eating up of the turtle and the ‘eternal life’ of the tribes folk!

Well, that, then, happened to be his ‘Eureka’ moment of sorts, and meant to be a teaser to the story! Nothing more! 

Coming back to what’s at stake on this post for us all! Norton Perina’s take on his lab routine has some points worth a ponder for this, our post!

That takes us to the part in the storyline, where Norton Perina describes his tryst with the lab in which he works, and his drudge of a routine!

Well, on this part in especial, one particularly weirdy sentence attracted my attention! And hence this post! ;-) I began focusing on it over and over, highlighted it with my yellow highlighter, and pored over its import again and again and again!

And that’s the part, reproduced below, where he says that, ‘In those days science considered itself the realm of gentlemen’.

In a nutshell, Dr. Norton Perina observes here that, people of science in those good ol’ days were people of genius! And being a man of genius back then did not mean they should lack social skills, and be unfriendly with the lay! Men of genius back then, had amazing skills and were very cordial and amiable with the lay, he observes! Then he contrasts this quality of a ‘gentleman’ with the present day ‘gentlemen’ of science, who according to him, present a social ineptitude, and a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills, along with an inability to dress properly or to feed oneself! The ‘gentlemen’ of science of today’s ‘strongly’ feel that, ‘lacking’ social skills, and dressing up like a ‘nerd’, and being callous, slatternly and slovenly in their habits, is the chief ‘evidence’ of one’s intellectual purity and ‘commitment’ to the life of the mind!

I quote Norton Perina –

But what does it mean to be successful or talented in a lab? For your work there is not truly your own; you are chosen because of your mind and then asked, to varying degrees, to cease thinking for yourself and begin doing so for another. For some people this is easier than for others; they are the ones who remain. And so although you gain fraternity, you forsake your independence.

They are all of them patient, though; I, however, knew by the end of my first term with Smythe’s lab that I could never be that patient, nor that pliable.

Part of this certainty was attributable to the discomfort I felt with the culture of the lab itself. there was at work a kind of conservatism, a fixation on neatness, that I found difficult and dispiriting. In those days science considered itself the realm of gentlemen. This was the era, after all, of Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer, both of them exceptional, of course, but not exempt from having to dress a certain way, or from being able to perform at cocktail parties, or from pursuing romance. Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as evidence of one’s intellectual purity and commitment to the life of the mind.

Ain’t there a little connect here between the ‘Lucky Jim’ saga [in this past post,] and the ‘highbrow’ gentlemen of the University presented therein, in which a lower-middle class young man – Jim Dixon by name, becomes a professor in medieval history at the University and he finds himself surrounded by despicable ‘high brow’ colleagues from the higher echelons of society, who have such high airs on them, and whom he loathes and despises very much.

Well, Jim was averse to their ilk because of their pretensions and snobbishness and their ‘high brow’ attitude towards other faculty and students! Those snobbish pretensions only tended to show them in bad light, says the angry young man, Jim aka Jim Dixon! Hence Jim decides to be antiestablishment - loathing to the core - the precepts of ‘gentlemanliness’ practised at his place of work!

Something akin to the gentlemen of the University, we find here, practiced amongst the ‘science’ folk too! Reminds of me of my all-time favvy writer Atwood, and her take on the ‘mad-scientist’ archetype, which we’d discussed back here, in our past post. Has got some real interesting connects with this post, as well!

One reason why, Hanya rips through their snobbishness and pretensions headlong!

Now, me thought of ending this post, on a grand note, to the malady that’s been plaguing the scientific community, too! The malady and the peril of ‘snobbishness’ and ‘pretensions’ that make the scientist assume that they are UFOs with some weird horns on them, not quite fit to associate with pavapetta mortals in general and the lay in particular!

Dr. Abdul Kalam, when he was President of our Nation, visited our grand, old Madras Christian College, way back in the year 2007.

I personally feel that, his talk on ‘Scientific Magnanimity’ at MCC, on 26 February 2007, [which I had reproduced in full on our blog, back then, on this past post,] would be a fitting and dignified retort to these science ‘gentlemen’ types whom Hanya here refers to with disdain and scorn!

Well, Dr. APJ stole our hearts on that eventful day, when he spoke from three great scientist- gentlemen from India, who have set us a paradigm worth emulating!

Over to APJ Sir, from his speech to us all, at MCC –

Since I am in the midst students, I thought of sharing with you an incident about Sir CV Raman – a Nobel Laureate in Physics for discovering Raman Effect. Raman gives the view that the color of sky is blue due to molecular diffraction which determines the observed luminosity and in great measures also its color. This led to the birth of the Raman Effect.

Raman was in the first batch of Bharat Ratna Award winners. The award ceremony was to take place in the last week of January, soon after the Republic Day celebrations of 1954. The then President Dr. Rajendra Prasad wrote to Raman inviting him to be the personal guest in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, when Raman came to Delhi for the award ceremony. Sir CV Raman wrote a polite letter, regretting his inability to go.

'Whether he is on earth or on the treetops, he behaves with decency!'

Calvino’s Cosimo | Qualities of a Gentleman!

Italo Calvino’s Cosimo is an ethereal being and a literary being, both literally and figuratively!

Cosimo has already found space in our past post here, over a year ago!

Well, for newbies then, Cosimo is a young nobleman of high rank, who decides one fine day to live high up among the trees and resolves to remain there for the rest of his life!

Quite interesting ain’t it, when a young nobleman of very high rank, suddenly, one fine day, climbs up and up, higher and higher into the trees as an act of rebellion and never ever decides to come back down to the earth?

From here, settled amongst the branches of the trees, he does a soulful connect with the great minds of the Enlightenment with ardent vigour and enthusiasm, and towards the end of his life, steps onto a better, wiser and higher plane.

Interestingly, Calvino, oops Cosimo ;-) comes up with wonderfully unique and ingenious answers to the pressing problems of humankind such as food, hygiene, clothing, friendship, etc through this brilliant text.

Although Calvino’s Cosimo is now a man so confined to the branches of the wildest of trees, he is still able to get the most revolutionary of thoughts and ideas, thanks to the books!

In fact, Calvino portrays Cosimo’s whole life as being guided passionately by three things: books and books and books!

Some of the descriptions found at the beginning of the book are so throbbing with the solace and the luxuries of Nature: on the nature of each tree, the animals, the sounds and scents.

The young baron’s resolve to lead an arboreal existence, makes him one of the most believable characters in the entire gamut of world literature. The alternate reality that enthralls the reader skyhigh with such intense wisdom, connecting so subtly with memory, history and nature, is unique and so one of its kind!

Earlier on, we had discussed the book over the ‘alternate reality’ platform. Hence, for this post we would be looking at the gentlemanly traits that the baron believes in, after his rejuvenating stay high above in the trees!

One fine day, when Cosimo was challenging ‘men on the ground’ to compete with him on his aiming skills, partly to try out his own capacities and discover just what he could manage to do up there on the treetops, he saw his father approaching him on horseback!

Now the baron’s life amongst the trees had a refreshing, therapeutic effect on him to such an extent that, he preferred the life among the trees, with ‘savages’ at the expense of his stately baronly life in his father’s fiefdom.

The cultural milieu of the karisal region is brought out with such ‘reality of representment!’

And Then | Dr. Marx [Poomani’s Piragu]

Dr. T. Marx has established himself as an impactful translator, by bringing out the aura and the cultural baggage of the original Tamil novel, with such a nuanced ‘reality of representment’ in his translation of Poomani’s Piragu into English. On this count, The Hindu ‘Bookworm’ review of 06 December 2019, has a raving caption for this translation which says, ‘True to the Land and its tongue: In And Then, Prof. Marx succeeds in capturing the Karisal flavor, which Poomani did in Piragu’.

Personally, me had the blessed opportunity of going through the manuscript to the book’s English version, way back in July 2018. One cursory glance through the manuscript, and one cannot but be quite astounded at Dr. Marx’s way with words, and the finesse with which he has captured the nuances of the original in all its grandeur! Something that comes to him so naturally, as a fish takes to water!

 My little take on the novel for y’all –

The novelist Poomani has woven a brilliant tale that depicts the pathetic and impoverished lives of the Chakkilyar community, under the influence of an oppressive caste structure and social stratification that has been widely prevalent in society.

The abrupt and conversational opening sets the tone and the tenor to the novel. The hierarchical power structures that are rampant in the village are subtly foregrounded in the conversation between Pothi Naicker and Karuppan! Karuppan, the cattle tender, addresses Naicker as ‘sami’ or ‘Lord’, which is a revered form of addressing a person of a upper caste! Naicker’s insolent spirit and Karuppan’s subdued temperament present a profound study in contrast!

As a representative of the powerful bourgeoisie class that controls wealth and power, Pothi Naicker is shown sleeping or taking rest, and his eyes turn red in anger when one of his sleeping bouts gets disturbed. On the other hand, Karuppan, who tends to his landlord’s buffaloes, has to always be on the alert!

From the hierarchical world of his landlord, Karuppan is shown entering an integrative world of equality, when he meets up with his uncle, Alagiri, a cobbler by profession. When Karuppan narrates the ignomious spat between him and his landlord, Alagiri asks him to take all that abuse and throw it away, as there was no use, whatsoever in getting upset!

Alagiri then ruminates on how he migrated to Manaloothu, after bidding farewell to his people in Duraisamipuram. Although his sickly wife protested his move to migrate to this haughty and bigger place, Alagiri was forced to come to Manaloothu, as the big men of the village had asked him to come there, and he could not refuse them, as they were his landlords.

The writer also highlights some social practices that were in vogue like the kaani system, whereby each man in chakkili cheri was assigned to a landlord on whose land the chakkili worked for a share in the produce. This provided assured supply of labour for the landlords in the village as well as means of sustenance for each chakkili household.

Soon, he gets accustomed to the new place, and he is also allotted a kaani quite soon. He also takes care not to antagonize the landlords, and goes about doing his kaani service in a very obliging and obsequious way.

But unfortunately, however much he earns, it does not prove enough for him. It was like feeding an elephant, since the expenditure on his wife’s treatment had almost wiped out his entire income. Although they tried every treatment and remedy possible, like oils, herbs, salves, etc., there seemed to be no remedy in sight! And soon Kali, his wife breathes her last.

Alagiri is so inconsolable and too stunned for words at the death of his wife. Now, he also has the burden of looking after his baby, and hence he decides against travelling out of the village. He confines himself to his child and the neem tree.

'The poor were very much needed because they constituted a crucial counterpoint for the ideal gentleman!'

The Role of Painters | In Promoting the ‘Ideal Gentleman!’

As we had discussed in our past post, Dalrymple’s forte lies in his ‘historical sweep’ that goes hand in hand with his foray into the realm of visual arts. And through this sojourn into the visual, it becomes quite easy and convenient from then on, for the likes of Dalrymple, to authenticate and to augment their own insightful points of view!

This trend of using the visual arts as promo and ammo for their arguments has been of immense help especially to scholars who sought to specialize in postcolonial scholarship per se!

Simon Gikandi, Professor of English with Princeton University, is one such Dalrymple of sorts, who wades deep into the visual arts, to augment and to articulate his own incisive insights and thoughts on slavery.

In his phenomenal text titled, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Gikandi, using a range of vast past archives, which include portraits and period paintings, diaries and personal narratives, seeks to bring out the reality out there between slavery and the cultures of taste. His argument is that, slavery and cultures of taste are not polar opposites at all. In fact, it is the ugliness of slavery which in actuality, defined and designed theories of taste, notions of beauty, gentlemanliness, and practices of high culture, he avers!

Like Dalrymple then, he opines that colonial wealth reinvented the category of the gentleman!  And here I quote –

As most of the major novels of the eighteenth century illustrate vividly, money, rather than rank, had become the major mediator of social relationships, the authorized agent of regulating behavior. Rather than serving as the immutable marker of class boundaries, taste had become an agent for prying the old class system; the upper ranks now seemed open to people with money and education; the availability of imports, such as East Indian textiles, provided greater choices of dress and furnishings; and, of course, colonial wealth reinvented the category of the gentleman.

Pointing to the Earl of Shaftesbury’s discourse on the aesthetic, Professor Gikandi observes that, the Earl’s discourse promoted the cult of the gentleman as the custodian of taste and in the process seemed to exclude the lower classes from the elevated culture of sensibility, and with a rider at that, that seemed to double up as a double bind!

And well, er… um… that’s exactly how the gentlemanly class got for themselves their elevated status and nobility! Indeed, for the Earl of Shaftesbury then, although the poor were despised and relegated to the margins, they were very much needed in his society, in his scheme of things, because, they constituted a crucial counterpoint for the ideal gentleman. A gentleman, he contended, was a person who held values at odds with ‘the vulgar habits of the people as well as the luxurious living identified with the court’.

In a similar way, representation of the marginalised and the poor in English landscape paintings in the eighteenth century also proved a shocker to Simon Gikandi. There were vested reasons on why the rural poor were not totally excluded from the domain of art! 

Indeed, as John Barrell has noted in The Dark Side of the Landscape, they became essential to the decor ‘of the drawing rooms of the polite’, says Simon Gikandi.

‘How-o-how?’, you seem to ask! 

Well, here, Professor Gikandi gives you and me an answer that proves a real shocker of sorts! Professor says that, ‘the very social classes that were considered to be outside the domain of taste functioned as counterpoints to the ideals of polite behavior or even as figures of desire; that which was outside the manifest framework of the dominant cultural signifiers was essential to their meaning’.

Professor Gikandi then proceeds to give an illustration of one such painting, through the works of Justus Engelhardt Kühn, a German migrant painter who worked in Maryland. This painter Kühn, specialized in paintings intended to enhance the status of ‘affluent colonialists in the developing landed aristocracy’. 

Young Henry Darnall, a wealthy Maryland planter seems to have been idealized to a great extent as a colonial powermaster in one such Kuhn painting. 

Gikandi asserts that, Darnall’s status as a young gentleman was enhanced not only by his elegant and extravagant royal robes and exotic props, including the bird and the bow, but also by the figure of a black boy, considered to be ‘the earliest known depiction of an African-American subject in American painting’.

Thus, the artist’s desire to inscribe his rank, wealth, power and social standing to his powermaster, within the colonial sphere, was fulfilled with gusto, by roping in one pavapetta black boy into the margins on the canvas, thus giving us all an indicator on how colonial-American notions of being and selfhood were established and authenticated!

The black boy then becomes the mark of the American difference, says Professor Gikandi.

To be continued…

image: Justus Engelhardt Kuhn, Henry Darnall III. Circa 1710. Oil on canvas. Maryland Historical Society.

Your way! Your destiny!!

Student Corner | Making the Most of Your Academic Life 

Ten Proactive Tips from your Teacher 

Well, the other day, a student of mine, from one of my PG Classes asked me, ‘Sir, how do you find time to read this much? And how do you find time to write this much?’

This post, me thought, would be part an answer and part an exhortation to my vibrant students to make the most of your time, - our vibrant students - whom we your teachers always envision as wonderful future pillars of our society!

But before my answer, let me give you my all-time inspirational story that made a huge difference to my perspectives, attitude and commitment towards life! 

Here goes the little story for y’all -

We all know this inspirational story of a chicken farmer who spotted an eagle’s egg, and brought it to his farm. He then proceeded to put it along with his chickens to be hatched. And very soon the egg hatched, and out came a beautiful little eaglet!

Now, the young eagle began to grow up with all the other chicken folk around him! He imitated whatever they did, and ate whatever they ate, because he had been thinking all along that he was one among them, just like them – a chicken!

Since the chickens could fly only for a very short distance, the eagle too learnt flying the way the chickens did! He thought that this was all he was supposed to do, and so he faithfully imitated it!

When you spot the eagle out there! ;-) Up above!
And that's exactly where they are meant to be! 

The gentle farmer then got an idea!

He took the little eagle with him, and went over to the beautiful mountain-side, at a vantage place from where the little eagle could see for himself, huge gigantic eagles of his own folk and ilk, flying gracefully and majestically soaring high above in the skies, sure and steady, enjoying their flight, soaring higher and higher, and diving down and down in their seasoned ways, like jets, to catch their prey.

'How a Corporation slowly evolved into an aggressive, strategic colonial power!'

William Dalrymple | Company turns Corporate Raider

Recently, I had the blessed opportunity of listening to William Dalrymple in New Delhi, just this last Saturday, to be precise! I was quite interested in the historic sweep which seasoned his impressive talk, that he spoke with such gusto to an ardent audience in rapt attention to every word and every line of what he had to say! (YouTube link follows!)

Acclaimed historian and author Dalrymple, was speaking extensively from his just released book, titled, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire!

‘One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: “loot”’, he started off, and went on to register his remarkable insights into this corporate plunder of epic proportions, even going to the extent of calling the East India Company, the world’s first corporate raider!!!

Yet another interesting observation that he made on the dais, caught my attention real well! He alluded to a medieval Welsh castle, in Powys, Wales, that goes by name Powis Castle! This Castle was built by the last hereditary Welsh prince, Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, way back in the 13th century! History has it that, this huge manorial estate seems to have been gifted on a platter unto him for vacating Wales and handing it over to the English monarchy!

Now, Dalrymple’s question is this: This castle seems to sport some of the rarefied gems, war spoils and treasures that were brought back home by Robert Clive and his son, Edward Clive, from off India, which included: some good old master paintings, along with the bounty accumulated after the Battles of Srirangapatna and Plassey, a vintage collection of intricately carved French and English furniture, amongst a host of such rare treasurable heritage collections! Now, how on earth, did this Castle of yore, come to house such a huge and exalted collection from off the imperial plunder, room after room!? he wonders!

He piled up one shocker after another by observing that, this private property on the quiet Welsh countryside - Powis Castle, - houses Mughal artefacts stacked beyond number – more and beyond the Mughal artefacts on display at any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi! These treasure-troves were far more valuable and much more of heritage value than even the Kohinoor diamond, he quips!

Be it the palanquins, be it the hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with ebony, spinels and jeweled daggers, green emeralds, ornaments of jade and ivory, talwars with yellow topaz, rare statues of the Hindu pantheon of gods, and more, how-o-how did it happen? he avers!

When he had visited this Powis Castle this last summer, one of these rich paintings, on a hugely framed canvas seemed to have caught his attention! And this painting contained the cue and the clue to how all these bounties from India had made their way, across climes and times to this private property, he observes!

The audience was all blued, glued and wooed! Not a soul stirred! We were all in such dazed, amazed attention to all that he was telling us, corroborating them all with ample evidence to his side of the defence!

This picture-painting that he witnessed at Powis Caste, was hanging in the shadows at the top of a dark, oak-panelled staircase, and although it was not a masterpiece of any high order, the painting seemed to repay a close study, he quipped. An Indian prince, wearing clothes of gold, is seen sitting on his throne under a bright silken canopy. To his left are seen standing ‘spear-bearing’ officers from his own army and to his right are seen a motley group of powdered and periwigged Georgian gentlemen!

The prince on the painting, is seen quite eagerly thrusting a scroll into the hands of a ‘slightly overweight’ Englishman in a red frock coat, he pointed out. [Since the picture he pointed out on screen wasn’t easy to look at from a distance, thought of giving it y’all here!]

The scene depicts a fine day in August 1765, when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East India Company troops, was pressurized to go for involuntary privatization! The scroll that is seen in the scene, is then an order that was meant to dismiss his own Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and replace them instead, with a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive – the new governor of Bengal! And that’s how the collecting of Mughal taxes was from thence on, contracted to a powerful multinational corporation!

'For new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'

Bob Dylan  | On Gentleness

When Dillon, aka Dylan - Bob Dylan’s name was announced as the Winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize, there were a host of bouquets and brickbats as well! We were one of the firsts to give a beauteous bouquet to Bob on this, our past post!

The reasons are more than meets the eye! 

Well, Dylan for one, openly rebelled against existing pop music conventions, and even on the folk front, he had sought to create quite a stir and a sensation when he brandished electric instruments in his folk concert, a sheer disregard for the rule of the land as concerns folk! 

One reason why his studio album Bringing It All Back Home alienated him from some of his pals in the folk music community!

His protest songs, especially ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ made him to be categorized as a protest singer, and a politically charged artist with an agenda!

When Dylan premiered 'Blowin' in the Wind', 16 April 1962

In fact he assumed world-wide fame, laudations and celebrity status with this amazing number, that posed a volley of intense rhetorical questions dealing with freedom, war and peace.

Such was the rage and such the craze on the release of this single album on 16 April 1962, that Dylan, from thence on, was seen as a saviour of the oppressed! 

It is no little wonder then that, ‘Blowin' in the Wind’ has always been described as an anthem of the civil rights movement! 

The song also prompted the renowned Civil Rights activist and singer Mavis Staples to remark, ‘I just could not understand how a young white man could write something that captured the frustration and aspirations of black people so powerfully’.

Such was the threat, and suchmuch the hazard it posed to those in power, who oppressed and suppressed the ‘voiceless’ beyond measure!

‘Masters of War’, is yet another protest song, such an impeccable song, filled with anti-war rhetoric. The song also lays claim to being one of the most angriest anti-war songs ever to be composed on the planet!

When the JFK regimen in the US was keen on a military action in Vietnam, Dylan pens this number that literally rips apart a motley group of bureaucrats who were like the harbingers of death, orchestrating wars from behind their desks, and provoking young soldiers to wield their guns and go on a killing spree! 

These bureaucrats, to Dylan, are like ‘Judas of old’ who keep spreading a grand lie again and again, by propagating a Cold War which was not there in the first place, until it went on to assume flesh and blood.

What a way with words he’s got when he stands up, as a gentleman, tall and bold, against the atrocities of ‘man over man’ [‘violence of beast on beast’ as Walcott woulda put it!] perpetrated behind the desks with such Judas-like cunning!

Here goes the number for y’all -

Masters of War

Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build the big bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it’s your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you set back and watch

When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion

As young people’s blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

Fear to bring children

Into the world

For threatening my baby

Unborn and unnamed

You ain’t worth the blood

That runs in your veins

How much do I know

To talk out of turn

You might say that I’m young

You might say I’m unlearned

But there’s one thing I know

Though I’m younger than you

Even Jesus would never

Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die

And your death’ll come soon

I will follow your casket

In the pale afternoon

How much truth there is to these intense lines that flow from a paroxysm of pain on the poet! No wonder his songs were intense socio-political commentaries with a ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ impact to their lines!

Let me now proceed to highlight one last song that I felt deserved a pertinent mention! 

The song is titled, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’. 

It was written by Dylan based on an incident that had affected him greatly. It gives a factual description of the shocking murder of a 51-year-old African-American barmaid, Hattie Carroll, a mother of ten children and several grandchildren, at the hands of a white and wealthy young man from a white tobacco farming family. 

The whole nation was shocked and enraged when the young white and wealthy man walked away with just a ‘six month’ sentence from the ‘noble’, ‘able’ ‘graceful’ ‘honourable’ and ‘gentle’ judges.

To do a quick take on the US Justice system from our own times would sure merit this post. Rajat Gupta, one of the first Indian corporate honchos who made it to the top most echelons of the US corporate world, when he was convicted and sentenced to prison by the US law courts!

Rajat Gupta observes in the Prefatorial to his memoir titled, Mind Without Fear [which we’ve discussed earlier on, over here, on this past post of ours!]

Says Rajat Gupta about the US Courts of Law - 

The judge went out of his way to block any reference to my character and to the aspects of my work that mattered most to me. The prosecutors were skillful in manipulating the press. And I missed that opportunity to tell my own story, and to let the jury, and the public, see who I am directly. For that, I take full responsibility. This book is that story.

Coming back to the case at hand, 

Well, Dylan quite couldn’t come to terms with the shocking miscarriage of justice by the Courts! Hence this song! This song with such a sting!

Me thought of giving y’all the song, to feel the import of the lines, and to magnify Dylan, Bob Dylan, on this, his immense social responsibility, as a song writer, when any many of his ilk were busy doling out romantic chart busters by the day and hogging the limelight at the billboards! 

Thanks to Dylan, we still speak about the 51-year old Hattie Carroll.

That’s where Dylan clearly outlines for us all, the role, the relevance and the transformative power of poetry to society, subtly hinting that, a pop song could be both a means of social commentary, and as a vehicle of protest that doubles up as a form of self-expression (poetry) as well!

So here goes the song –

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gathering

And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him

As they rode him in custody down to the station

And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Take the rag away from your face

Now ain't the time for your tears

William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years

Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres

With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him

And high office relations in the politics of Maryland

Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders

And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling

In a matter of minutes, on bail was out walking

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize fears

Take the rag away from your face

Now ain't the time for your tears

Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen

She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children

Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage

And never sat once at the head of the table

And didn't even talk to the people at the table

Who just cleaned up all the food from the table

And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level

Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane

That sailed through the air and came down through the room

Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle

And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger

And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Take the rag away from your face

Now ain't the time for your tears

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel

To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level

And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded

And that even the nobles get properly handled

Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em

And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom

Stared at the person who killed for no reason

Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'

And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished

And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance

William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence

Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Bury the rag deep in your face

For now's the time for your tears

Just take some time to observe his intense lines on the rule of the land and the rule of law. Also take even more time to observe carefully the last lines of each stanza, and how they taper off to a bold acme towards the end!

The song greatly impacted me with its take on gentleness! Dylan subtly contrasts the ‘gentlemanly’ high brow behaviour of the wealthy pig Zanzinger with the real life gentle and graceful Hattie, who ‘carried the dishes and took out the garbage, and never sat once at the head of the table, and didn't even talk to the people at the table, who just cleaned up all the food from the table’! 

Then he proceeds to say, that the cane of Zanzinger sailed through the air and came down through the room determined to destroy the gentle Hattie, who never harmed the wealthy Zanzinger in any way whatsoever!

Clifton and Anne, Dylanologists, ;-) in their article titled, ‘Bob Dylan and Religion’, have an enlightening observation on this count! 

Say they –

In one of the song’s most beautiful lines, associating Hattie Carroll with the ancient poor and forsaken so often remembered by Isaiah or Jeremiah, Dylan speaks of her death as betokening the destruction of “all the gentle,” drawing the irony from the last word with its Latinate origin as a term referring to the well-born. 

By this clever inversion, a technique Dylan borrowed straight from the prophets, the well-born have destroyed their claim to gentleness and passed judgment on themselves, even if the corrupt judge won’t do the same; and if any gentleness remains, in the way of virtue, it has been passed on to the servant class.

Her death, therefore, to Dylan signals the destruction of ‘all the gentle’ or the ‘noble’ or the ‘highbrow’ or the ‘elite’! 

Moreover, it also helps in a paradigm shift – a shift of core values of gentleness – once the forte of the wealthy and the rich – to the so-called working class, referred to here as the ‘servant class’ by Dylan for that much-needed emphasis!

It would do a world of good to sum up this little post on Dylan, Bob Dylan with his own sweet lines -

Come you ladies and you gentlemen, listen to my song,

I’ll sing it to you right but you may think it’s wrong,

It may make you mad, but I mean no harm!

No wonder, he like Ali, Mohammed Ali, floats like a butterfly, and stings like a bee!

The topping on the cake would be from a book I consider so precious and so dear, gifted to me by my sweet cousin! It’s titled, Why Dylan Matters, by Richard F. Thomas, another Dylanologist of the highest order! ;-)

When talking about Dylan’s fan base, Richard F. Thomas here remarks –

Bob Dylan may not say anything to his audience, but he is curious about who’s out there; he’s taking it all in. “What are you seeing from the stage?” Robert Love asked him:

Definitely not a sea of conformity. People I cannot categorize easily. I see a guy dressed up in a suit and tie next to a guy in blue jeans. I see another guy in a sport coat next to another guy wearing a T-shirt. 

I see a woman sometimes in evening gowns, and I see punk-looking girls. I can see there’s a difference in character, and it has nothing to do with age. 

I went to an Elton John show; there must have been at least three generations of people there. But they were all the same. Even the little kids. They looked just like their grandparents. It was strange.

This inclusivity, this variety, this multicultural ambience, was, is, and will continue to be his forte and his sure reward too!

Well folks, now you woulda sure known the devil and his angels who woulda opposed tooth and nail the conferring of the grandest prize in Literature – the Nobel – on Dylan - Bob Dylan! Now go ahead and read the first two paragraphs once again. ;-)

Thank you ladies and gentlemen!

To be continued…

images: Michael Ochs/Gettyimages, Maria Zlatani