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Truths about Palestine |
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Hawking denies God |
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Rajendra Prabhu |
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THE first time I saw Stephen Hawking, perhaps the greatest living physicist and cosmologist in the world, I was stuck by one single thought. It happened in Delhi's Siri Fort hall. I had earlier sought for interviewing him while in London but failed to get an appointment. Now here was the idol of many ardent followers of science wheeled on to the stage in a huge hall overflowing to capacity with people sitting on the floor after the chairs were occupied. Outside many more hundreds were banging to get in.
Such audience is very rare for lectures that should be beyond the comprehension of the majority. In Delhi, for many such intellectual banquets organizers normally have to wait to get at least a respectable audience. But Stephen Hawking's fame was so great the concourse I saw there could only be true for a great film star's darshan, not for a talk on Cosmology. I could get into the hall purely on the strength of my Press card and had to occupy the floor.
As the author of the best seller "A Brief History of Time" was wheeled in, lying comatose with his entire body paralyzed and yet his eyes shining through his neuro-muscular infirmity, the very first thought I had was: God, here is the proof of your grace. I knew however that Hawking was no respector of God and would use every occasion to mock at Him. When the cosmologist began his lecture -- he has to speak using a voice synthesizer and a computer -- the audience sat through the whole hour electrified and his voice was clear and his sentences as sharp as the edge of a sword cutting through our confusion about the cosmos we live in. Incidentally, the simile often used in Vedic texts for the discipline (sadhana) to realize the Divine is "like walking on the edge of the sword".
Hawking contends in essence that the design of the cosmos does not require a Creator (God) either for its evolution or its sustenance. The laws of physics could explain how it originated and exists.
This September 7, Hawking has released his latest book "The Grand Design" that he has co-authored with another physicist Leonard Mlodinow. The latter teaches at Caltech. And Hawking as the world knows is professor at Cambridge University occupying the very chair of mathematics that Sir Issac Newton did once.
I have not read the book as yet but only gone through a lengthy summary that Wall Street Journal has come out with. The professor begins with the Viking mythology to address the issue in a popular way. The Viking's interpreted eclipses as occurring when the two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or the moon. So they make huge noise banging pots and the two frightened wolves then leave their prey and the eclipse ends and there is rejoicing. It was only afterwards that people realized that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots. (Even now, millions in our country believe that eclipses are caused by Rahu and Ketu, two malevolent planets or nods in the planetary system, grasping the sun or moon for a short time, despite our ancients being pioneers in astronomy and could predict the eclipses with tremendous accuracy).
Hawking uses this myth to point out that it was "ignorance of nature's ways that led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world." He adds: "Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test -- in other words, modern science", for the same purpose. Quoting from Einstein's observation that the universe is comprehensible, he says that the propounder of the Theory of Relativity meant that "everything in the universe follows laws, without exception."
Issac Newton said that the order in the universe was "created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition". The recent discoveries regarding the working of the cosmos reveal tremendous fine-tuning of so many laws of nature that make some, even scientists, to bring back the idea that the grand design of the cosmos is the work of a grand Designer (God in effect). Hawking's contention is that "Yet, the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator."
In proposing this, Hawking is not far from truth. For many centuries since Newton propounded the fundamental laws of physics, even scientists were not able to answer the question about the origin of the cosmos, for instance, how out of the primal chaos such perfect order as we see in the cosmos emerges and exists. But now this mystery or cloud is clearing with better insight into the farthest reaches of space as well as into the heart of the moment of the Big Bang that threw up the cosmos ultimately. Hawking points out that things "had to be" such that this universe emerges and get populated in one tiny corner of it and of course in many other tiny corners as well of which we are not aware.
The precision of the cosmic laws is both awesome and challenging. Physicists now say that a "change of as little as 0.5 per cent in the strength of the strong nuclear force" (one of the five fundamental forces of the universe) or 4 per cent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen, and hence the possibility of life as we know it." We also know that if the Big Bang lasted even a millisecond longer than what it did, the further story would have been more chaos rather than ordered cosmos emerging out of it. Or if protons were even 0.2 per cent heavier, they would decay into neutrons and the building blocks of all matter, atoms, would be destabilsied.
It is the "fragility" of all existence that has made man wonder whether these are mere coincidences or the result of a conscious direction from a Creator. After discussing about this in depth, Hawking concludes all these postulations of a God at the helm of these "coincidences" "is not the answer of modern science". Then how did so much happened out of nothing? Hawking says: "As recent advances in cosmology suggest the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
From there Hawking who strangely has missed the Nobel Prize for all his fundamental contributions to cosmology and physics (something he often reminds us) goes on to explain how there are multiple universes and how this world is in fact not a universe but a "multiverse". These different universes could have different laws from ours. Physicist Paul Davies long back advanced his theory of multi-universes in his challenging 1980 book "Other Worlds". In some of these multiverses, says Davies, time could be so to say "running backwards".
Hawking further supports this possibility and then his conclusion could be the most devastating blow he could deliver to those who had imagined that God created us on this earth for a specific purpose. He says: "Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation."
What Hawking means is that 'creation' is simply in the imagination of the man which enabled him in the absence of a more intelligent life in sight to assume that he is the lord of creation.
Perhaps there lay the question to challenge Hawking. And that not just from savants and saints but from equally reputed scientists. Referring to several scientists who have sought to demolish God, Dr. E.C.G. Sudarshan, considered a leading authority on quantum mechanics, in the book he co-authored with another physicist Tony Rothman titled "Doubt and Certainty", says: "Atkin's professed aim is to show that there is no need to invoke the supreme being to account for the creation of the universe. Fair enough. But it is also fair to ask what has been gained from the substitution of scientific terminology for Old Testament art. Having read Atkin's reworking of the Genesis, do we feel satisfied that an understanding of the universe's creation is in hand? Has he answered Augustine's question about what God was doing before creation?"
Dr. Sudarshan says Hawking’s provocation, "What place, then for a creator?" is the latest extension of the argument 200 years ago by Lalpacians that once God started off the universal clock work there was no further need for him: the no-boundary condition (a postulate of Hawking in explaining the cosmos) proscribes him from interfering even in the creation of space-time...To all but the most liberal-minded the conflicts between Bible and cosmology seem irrelevant.
Hawking says: "As recent advances in cosmology suggest the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing.
We could also quote extensively from Fritj Capra's The Tao of Physics to challenge Hawking. There are others who as scientists have scaled the heights of research and yet had the humility to seek and experience God and proclaim His imminence as the most rational explanation for the reality that we experience.
I have been fortunate to interact with the co-inventor of the Laser, Dr. Mani Bhaumik, whose book Code name God became a Los Angeles Times' best seller. Taking from what Dr. Sudarshan had pointed out first in science, namely the Quantum Zero Effect (in which a particle could be kept in its excited state by paying constant attention to it), Dr. Bhaumik says that in deep meditation "we access the power behind all existence." What is that power? Dr. Bhaumik answers: "It is the power of the one source, the order that underlies and enfolds all orders, that unifies all fields and forms, as well as consciousness, and it will not, by now, surprise you to hear my assertion that we call this source by its code name : God."
The recently deceased savant, scholar and Christian priest Raimon Panikkar (author of 'The Fullness of Man', 'The Cosmo-theandric Experience' and several other books) quotes in his earliest book "The Unknown Christ of Hinduism" the Gospel of John (1:26): "Among you stands whom you know not."
May be, a day may come soon when Stephen Hawking realizes that in his own tremendous cosmic size intelligence sheathed in a neuro-muscular atrophying body, God has given him his peculiar grace. (Courtesy: Indian Currents)
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The writer is a senior journalist and former president of the National Union of Journalists (India) |
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Forster's tumultous life |
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Colm Toibin |
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IN 1943, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote a book about the work of E. M. Forster without knowing that the novelist was homosexual. Trilling had enough to write about, including the drama in Forster's work between freedom and restriction, between the spiritual and the material, between England and its empire, and between one class and another in Forster's own world. These conflicts were substantial enough for Trilling not to need to know that they also operated as metaphors and systems of disguise, that their power in Forster's fiction was nourished by his secret sexuality.
Edward Morgan Forster was born in 1879. Since his father died soon after his birth, he was brought up by his difficult and demanding mother, with whom he lived much of the time until her death in 1945. Between 1905 and 1924, Forster published five novels, most notably "Howards End" and "A Passage to India." For the following
46 years, however, until his death in 1970, he wrote no more novels, merely a few short biographies, some essays and literary journalism.
In "A Great Unrecorded History," a well-written, intelligent and perceptive biography of Forster, Wendy Moffat attempts to explore that silence and at the same time to draw a picture of a figure who was sensitive, sensuous and kind, an artist who possessed a keen, plain sort of wisdom and lightness of touch that make him, to this day, an immensely influential novelist, almost a prophet. She uses the sources for our knowledge of Forster's sexuality, including letters and diaries, without reducing the mystery and sheer individuality of Forster, without making his sexuality explain everything.
Nonetheless, his sexuality explained a great deal. At the beginning, Forster "taught himself how to feel," Moffat writes, "by force of a fierce, obtuse innocence." In his diaries he wrote that he did not know "exactly how male and female joined" until he was 30. The idea that he was homosexual had occurred to him somewhat earlier, but he did not act on it until 1916.
Forster was one of those Englishmen who found freedom, inspiration and relief in places like India and Egypt. His first great love was with a young and "profoundly handsome" Indian whom he met in England when he was 27 and later traveled to India to see. But it was in Alexandria during the First World War that he met one of the two men who were to mean the most to him in his life and with whom he conducted passionate affairs. Forster wrote to a friend about Muhammad el-Adl, a young Egyptian tram conductor: "I have plunged into an anxious but very beautiful affair. It seemed to me -- and I proved right -- that something precious was being offered me and that I was offering something that might be thought precious... I should have been right to take the plunge, because if you pass life by it's jolly well going to pass you by in the future. If you're frightened it's all right -- that's no harm; fear is an emotion. But by some trick of the nerves I happen not to be frightened."
The second great love of his life was the English policeman Bob Buckingham, whom he met in 1930; the affair continued, perhaps even intensified, after Buckingham's marriage. Moffat (who teaches English at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania) writes about Forster's relationship to May, Buckingham's wife, with real tenderness: "Between them, Morgan and May deftly carved out an intimate space for their respective 'marriages' to their beloved Bob, with the long weekends for May and the short weekends for Morgan."
While Forster in his personal life was open and passionate, as a public figure he remained very cautious. In 1912, two years after "Howards End" was published, he made a visit to Edward Carpenter, having deposited his mother, who was plagued by gout and rheumatism, at a spa. Carpenter was a socialist and a believer in all kinds of freedom, including sexual freedom. He lived with his boyfriend, George Merrill, who touched the visiting Forster "just above the buttocks." This touch was electrifying and deeply memorable. Almost 50 years later, Forster recalled the thrill: "It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts."
As a result, "as if he were on fire," Forster wrote his novel "Maurice," which he did not publish in his lifetime because of its explicit dramatization of homosexuality. He was intent that the novel not be a story of tragedy or impossible love that would end with imprisonment or suicide. "A happy ending was imperative," he wrote. While he showed it to some associates over the years, including Lytton Strachey and Christopher Isherwood, he knew that it could not come out "until my death and England's," as he wrote to a friend.
Forster believed that his own life as a novelist had been stunted by his inability to make fiction out of his sexual desires. This was how he explained his silence as a novelist after "A Passage to India." While this seems to make sense, it is perhaps too easy, and perhaps even untrue. It may be more true to say that Forster wrote the five books on which his reputation rests because he desperately needed to create characters and situations that would expose his own plight in ways that were subtle and dramatic without being obvious or explicit. His true nature was not only homosexual, it was also wounded, mysterious and filled with sympathy for others, including foreigners and women. Despite his best intentions, he allowed all of himself into the five novels published in his lifetime, and only part of himself into "Maurice."
There is a strange moment in Moffat's book when she refers to "Maurice" as Forster's "only truly honest novel." But "Maurice" is, while fascinating in its own way, also his worst. Perhaps there is a connection between its badness and its "honesty," because novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors; because the lies and metaphors are chosen and offered shape and structure, they may indeed represent the self, or the play between the unconscious mind and the conscious will, but they are not forms of self-expression, or true confession.
Because of his silence about his sexuality, some of Forster's friends, including Virginia Woolf, felt sorry for him, and believed also that he had a drab life as a literary man -- dominated by his mother -- who could no longer write. But Moffat, with considerable care and a sort of sympathy that Forster himself would have appreciated, makes the case for his life as an exemplary one. Forster set out to love and be loved, and he did this despite all the odds. He also wrote with beauty and clarity. He stood for liberty, the individual, the sensuous life. He had a gift for --friendship.
The old age of this great Englishman was much cheered up by trips to America, by the sly knowledge that he had a hidden manuscript, by the rooms he was given at King's College, Cambridge, which were his main residence between his mother's death and his own death. His final years were also greatly enriched by Bob and May Buckingham, who looked after him as he lay dying. During his last days, Moffat writes, "May continuously held his hand. If she tried to withdraw it, he half opened an eye in remonstration.' Only someone with Forster's skills and imagination could have maintained such an odd and heartening relationship over so many years. (Courtesy: The New York Times)
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Colm Toibin's most recent novel is “Brooklyn.” |
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An unforgettable book |
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Meetu Tewari |
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Lessons in Forgetting
Anita Nair
HarperCollins
329 Pages, Rs 399
ANITA NAIR is a popular Indian-English writer who was born in Kerala. Her first book -- a collection of short stories -- was 'Satyr of the Subway'. She also wrote 'The Better Man and Mistress'.
'Lessons in Forgetting' is her latest offering, a novel she wanted to be light reading which anyone could follow. It is a novel focusing on themes such as parenthood, marriage and relationships.
When the novel opens we are introduced to Meera, the cool and composed successful corporate wife who also writes cook books and who is suddenly faced with the dilemma of a disappeared husband.
While Meera strives to keep control of things and keeps her emotions in check, Prof. J. Krishnamurthy or Jak is an expressive and deep man who has returned to India from the US to find out what happened to his elder daughter.
A lot of expectation is built up as the novel progresses as to what has happened to Shruti, Jak's daughter. The truth, when revealed, is melodramatic and anti-climatic.
Throwing in the worrisome trend of female foeticide, though a noble cause, completely fails the plot. Everything seems too exaggerated.
Despite this shortcoming, the author has succeeded in writing an engaging novel. A novel where the protagonists have their worlds swept away like the havoc a cyclone wreaks, and yet destiny and their own determination helps them find their way to happiness again.
Anita Nair especially wished to focus on this element of lives being torn apart and being rebuilt, the way people rebuild their homes once a cyclone destroys them. In this instance a cyclone (the meeting of hot and cold air produces it) is representative of the two main characters, Meera the cool wife and the intense Jak.
The relationship between parents and children has been touchingly described. The novel also has an array of colorful characters, from Meera's mother and grandmother to the struggling actor to Vinnie. Though some of them are too typical and stereotyped, these characters lend the novel its own rich flavor.
Interjecting the novel with excerpts on cyclones and their nature is a unique touch which works to the advantage of the novel. Similarly the constant comparison of Meera to Hera is a singularly artistic achievement of the author.
'Lessons in Forgetting' succeeds in being a light novel which anyone can enjoy reading. It is again a hopeful novel and the reader is left with a tantalizing hint that, in the end, things do turn out well for the protagonists. The plot may not be very intelligent and the ending anti-climatic after the elaborate efforts to build up suspense but the novel is still recommended, if you can leave your skepticism behind. |
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A new politics |
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Daniel E. Ritchie |
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Traveling the U.S. with Alexis de Tocqueville.
AT a conference on Democracy in America several years ago, one of the speakers took up Alexis de Tocqueville's prediction that increased centralization and equality in the United States would produce the "soft despotism" of a "schoolmaster" state: "Above [the citizens] rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes charge of ensuring their pleasures and watching over their fate," Tocqueville writes.
It is absolute, detailed, regular, farsighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood. It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment ... The sovereign power doesn't break their wills, but it softens, bends, and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action. It doesn't destroy, but it prevents birth; it doesn't tyrannize, but it hinders, represses, enervates, restrains, and numbs, until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as their shepherd.
The speaker admitted that we can already see this effect in America, and more government would accelerate the process. But as long as the despotism is soft, he said, why worry? I almost asked him to return his speaker's fee. The reason a Tocquevillian worries is that the schoolmaster state prevents us from exercising our liberty in the fullest sense of that word—to solve our own problems, to explore religious or philosophical avenues that defy majority opinion, and (yes) to find new ways of creating wealth. President Obama's effort to nudge us toward the right choices with behavioral economics is just the latest iteration of this worrying trend. Which isn't to say that I'm above being nudged: last year I got a tax credit for buying energy efficient windows. Will I get a gold star from the schoolmaster too?
It is typical of the excellent research in Leo Damrosch's new book that he retrieves Tocqueville's marginal note about the passage: "New despotism. It is in the portrayal of this that resides all the originality and depth of my idea."
As the scion of an aristocratic family that had suffered much in the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) dreaded the schoolmaster state as a possible outcome of democracies in France and elsewhere. The country would be industrious but mediocre, its souls ambitious but small-minded. Without oppressing huge numbers of people, it would degrade its citizens "below the level of humanity." What was needed, Tocqueville argued, was "a new political science for … a world altogether new," and his book was written to help democracies avoid all despotism, hard or soft. He had in mind primarily a French democracy that would succeed the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830-48). Suffice it to say that the Second Republic under Louis Napoleon (1848-70) was not what he meant, not what he meant at all.
Damrosch's method is to follow Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, on their nine-month tour of the United States in 1831-32, which provided the material for the two-part masterpiece (1835, 1840). Ostensibly on a tour of American prisons to collect notes for French prison reform, their voyage quickly took on its deeper significance of analyzing modern democracy. Damrosch gives us just enough background to set the context and direct our attention. We learn about the young men's weakness for American women and about Beaumont's slave novel, Marie—both relevant to Tocqueville's social analysis—but the book never gives way to tangents.
A distinguished scholar of 18th-century literature who teaches at Harvard, Damrosch pauses at strategic moments to explore Tocqueville's cultural insights in greater depth, often supplementing Democracy in America with his other writings. For instance, after describing Tocqueville's meetings with Jared Sparks, a politically astute biographer of Washington, Damrosch investigates his analysis of the salient idea they discussed: majority rule. Tocqueville had written in his notebook:
The majority … is always right, and there is no power above it.
Each individual person, society, town, or [state] is the sole lawful judge of its own interest.
Damrosch observes the way these two principles took root in Tocqueville's mind over time, enabling him to see their "dark reverse side," namely "the potential for a stultifying tyranny of the majority... America was thus a nation of paradox, of individualists who were deeply conformist." There are many such moments in Damrosch's book. The writing is concise, insightful, and altogether a pleasure to read.
This doesn't mean, of course, that one will agree with every judgment and emphasis in the book. How could that be when the subject is a writer like Tocqueville, who invites admirers from every political stripe? For instance, Damrosch laments Tocqueville's neglect of social class, "which Marx would soon bring to the center of political theory." And elsewhere he commends Tocqueville's eventual "recogni[tion] that evangelical fervor had deep roots in class resentment." I suppose one can argue that Jonathan Edwards' evangelical fervor was related to his resentment of Increase Mather's social class, if you eliminate all other forces and all evidence to the contrary. But why bother? Many recent scholars have been drawn to Tocqueville precisely as an alternative to those Marxian class analyses that proved so rigorous yet inexact, so prophetic and yet so wrong.
Tocqueville's analyses, by contrast, have proven much more durable, such as his concerns about individualism drying up Americans' public engagement and our typical ways of combating this problem through voluntarism, the family, and religion. These elements, which we now call "social capital," could have received more attention from Damrosch. They are the main sources of the "mores" that, in Tocqueville's view, create and sustain the "habits of the heart ... [and] mind" that keep a modern democracy healthy. Mores are more important than laws, for they form the laws. For instance, religion is "the first of their political institutions," he writes, because it teaches Americans how to use freedom rightly. He considers American women to be the makers of mores and hence the most significant directors of American society. Finally, an understanding of how to organize voluntary associations is, for Tocqueville, "the mother science" of modern democracy. If it should ever be lost—to the omnicompetent schoolmaster state, for instance -- "civilization itself would be in peril."
Like any great book, Democracy in America attracts good writing without being exhausted by even the most thorough analysis. Along with Joseph Epstein's popular biography Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide (HarperCollins 2006), Damrosch's book serves as one the finest introductions to Tocqueville's work in recent years. Once in, you'll want to stay.
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Daniel E. Ritchie directs the Humanities Program at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author most recently of The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer (Baylor Univ. Press).
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Courtesy: Christianity Today |
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War through a camera lens |
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Janet Maslin |
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THE LOTUS EATERS
By Tatjana Soli
389 pages. St. Martin's Press. $24.99.
TATAJANA SOLI'S haunting debut novel begins where it ought to end. In this quietly mesmerizing book about journalists covering the war in Vietnam, the first glimpses of the place are the most familiar. The year is 1975. Americans are in a state of panic as North Vietnamese forces prepare to occupy Saigon. The looters, the desperate efforts to escape this war zone, the mobs surrounding the United States Embassy, the overcrowded helicopters struggling to rise above the chaos: these images seem to introduce Ms. Soli's readers to a story they already know.
Her protagonist is Helen Adams, a war photographer. As Helen makes her way toward the embassy with a wounded Vietnamese man named Linh, she surveys the ruins of her own wartime experience. A friend is missing, and that friend's shop has been looted. Refugees are everywhere. And Sam Darrow, the charismatic, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has meant everything to Helen, is long gone. He died at some point in Helen's tumultuous Vietnam tenure.
Ms. Soli thus creates a serious challenge for her narrative. How is she to breathe life into a book that has already answered the most pertinent questions about its characters? Her extremely successful way of surmounting this obstacle is to lead readers into the naïve, unformed mind of the newly arrived Helen, who, way back in 1965, barely understood her talents or her professional raison d'être. "The Lotus Eaters" expands along with her as she grows into her expert photojournalist's role.
This quick shift in time frames proves to be much more seductive than a simple introduction to the older, tougher Helen would be. How does this yeoman photographer from California start out as a freelance (she eventually lands a job with Life magazine) and learn what war reporting is all about? To begin with, she takes a terrible ribbing from the men already entrenched in this work, men who like calling her Sweetheart and Prom Queen and treat her as the butt of disparaging wisecracks. ("So now the girls are coming. Can't be much of a war after all.") Her initiation rites include being exposed to every hoary cliché imaginable about seasoned war reporters who thrive on witnessing bloodshed in countries not their own.
Sometimes, in this otherwise tough and lyrical book, those ideas can be expressed a bit clumsily. "We're in the business of war," one pro tells Helen. "The cool thing for us is that when this one's done, there's always another one -- Middle East, Africa, Cambodia, Laos, Suez, Congo, Lebanon, Algeria. The war doesn't ever have to end for us."
The speaker is none other than dashing Sam Darrow, who is, according to one of his sardonic colleagues, "more commonly known as Mr. Vietnam." Sam turns out to be irresistible. Ms. Soli is somehow able to set off sparks between two photographers, the neophyte Helen and the seasoned, much-admired and very married Sam, without remotely suggesting that they are not on an equal footing. "Perhaps at long last he had met his match in female form?" Sam wonders about their nascent love affair. He has, and he has also met a woman who will emerge after much hard-won work experience as his professional equal.
If it sounds as if a love story is the central element in "The Lotus Eaters" (which takes its title from those characters in "The Odyssey" who succumb to the allure of honeyed fruit), Ms. Soli's book is sturdier than that. Its object lessons in how Helen learns to refine her wartime photography are succinct and powerful. By exposing its readers to the violence of war only gradually and sparingly, the novel becomes all the more effective. Helen's photograph of a harmless-looking old man's sudden execution offers an especially indelible image. So does her witnessing of one rebellious soldier's way of taking his fate into his own hands. And her efforts, with Sam, to help a maimed Vietnamese child backfire in ways both terrible and illuminating.
Helen's story has an obvious demarcation point. First there is Sam; then there isn't. She moves on to an intimacy with the complicated, subtle Linh, who worked as Sam's assistant but had many earlier experiences about which Helen learns during their solace-providing union. Each of them grows and changes in ways that give "The Lotus Eaters" dramatic impact even when its characters become hardened and battle-weary.
Ms. Soli has done prodigious research about the Vietnam War, particularly about the role of female war photographers, and so is able to imbue an otherwise deeply romantic book with a strong sense of history. She artfully uses Helen's autodidactic approach to photography as a way of raising questions that her readers need to answer too. What is a war photographer's mission? The book suggests that the job involves developing both a discerning eye (Sam is said to have birdlike movements, as if they allow him to look at things from many angles at once) and an analytic understanding of what the camera records.
Helen's experience peaks when she has mastered these aspects of the job. It becomes irrevocably altered when she senses the vulturelike attitude of journalists who flock to the site of a lost war for reasons of naked professional ambition. By the end of the story -- in ways that bring to mind the feverishness of the Iraqi war film "The Hurt Locker," with its very different locations, job descriptions and wartime imperatives -- she has been utterly transformed. She is no longer a witness to history. As Ms. Soli makes her readers understand very viscerally, Helen has become part of the history that she set out to record. (Courtesy: The New York Times) |
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Nine lives, one quest |
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Meetu Tewari |
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Nine Lives
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury
Pages: 284
Price: Rs 324
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE is one of the best travel writers of contemporary times. Born in Scotland, he was brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. 'In Xanadu' was his first novel and was written when he was just 22. Dalrymple, who has been presented with several awards, lives on a farm outside Delhi with his wife Olivia Fraser and three children. His latest offering, 'Nine Lives', is as interesting and intriguing as ever. "In search of the sacred in modern India" says the subtitle. The book covers diverse religious beliefs and practices that stand out in stark contrast to the rapidly developing India; the economic power called India.
The author says he has attempted to stay silent and let the people, whose stories are narrated, be the main characters. Dalrymple does not judge, and his objective narrative is peppered with the description of unique practices and the humane voice and emotive appeal of nine persons whose experiences and lives are disclosed within the pages of this book.
The first story is of Prasannamati Mataji, who as a girl born into a rich family, decides to follow the difficult path of Jainism. On her path to diksha and of cutting ties with her family, she meets Prayogamati, who becomes her lifelong companion and friend. Her story is one of pain and suffering, yet with a thread of peace interconnecting it all. Peace that comes from following a path one loves. However, as with all the stories, the narrative does not stop by telling the stories of these unique individuals.
Each story is rich in detail of the religions and beliefs being described. Any reader of this novel will gain vast knowledge of these aspects. Learning through fascinating stories is an art William Dalrymple is quite aware of and he uses it in this novel as well.
Another story deals with the remarkable dance form called Theyyam, popular in Kerala. Here the story of Hari Das is told to us -- a well-known theyyam dancer, who otherwise digs wells and is a prison guard. Together with the tale of when Dalits and others who are considered to be of the lower castes get to become gods and have higher caste Brahmins touch their feet, we also discover quietly the fate of some Indian prisons, where inmates rule over the guards. Unobtrusively adding details of such things as they exist in India today, the reader is given a firsthand account of illegal happenings. These details are not the focus of the story but their clever mention cannot be ignored either.
Daughters of Yellamma is a sorrowful tale of devadasis, women dedicated as young girls to the goddess Yellamma and who have come to work in the sex trade. Their poignant tale speaks of hardship and sorrow, as they are forced into this field by their parents and then work to feed their families. The history behind this age-old custom and the trauma faced by devadasis today are all to be found within the pages of this book, which has daringly brought to light this controversial practice and yet managed to retain its objectivity.
The Singer of Epics is a tale of Mohan Bhopa, one of the two last known hereditary singers of a Rajasthani epic, The Epic of Pabuji. Actually a 4,000 line poem, it takes five days and nights to recite it completely, something rarely done today. Ancient practices connected to the recital of the poem have survived the ages and are followed religiously by the singers. Importantly, a male singer must also have a musical wife who could accompany him as he sings. The bhopas are described as 'shamans and bards' who have retained their traditional jobs, as these societies remained virtually untouched by the colonialists. William Dalrymple quietly mentions the survival of practices like sati and widow-burning in these areas of Rajasthan, which again form a vividly contrasting image to the modern India. The author dwells on this practice of singers of traditional poems, mentioning their existence in European countries.
The Red Fairy is a tale on Sufism in Sindh, Pakistan. It is a religion and mystical belief that attracts followers from Hindu and Muslim faiths. Sufi saints preached that all religions are one and one should try and attain fana, which is 'total immersion in the absolute'. Lal Peri Mastani, a famous lady fakir, is the character most in focus in this story. As her tale unfolds, the reader finds out the distance she travelled to find peace in the house of Lal Shahbaz Qalander. We are told of the recent attacks on Sufi shrines by the Pakistani Taliban, who are enforcing radical Islam on the believers of Sufism. Extremism is threatening the teachings of Sufi saints, who taught acceptance and tolerance and who succeeded in bringing Hindus and Muslims together.
Tashi Passang is a monk who took up arms to fight for his homeland, Tibet. He took up arms hoping to fight for Tibet, but he and others were instead mislead when they joined the Indian Army. They had to fight for Bangladesh, killing Pakistani soldiers. Tashi (now an old man) then set out on a path of redemption, seeking forgiveness for his actions and waiting till the time he could be worthy again of being a monk. It is a tale of a family destroyed, a way of living challenged, of people forced to flee. It is not a political text, rather a simple retelling of how things went bad.
The Maker of Idols takes place in Tamil Nadu where Srikanda Satpathy makes bronze statues of gods and goddesses and believes that the deity resides in the sculpture. Each figure, however, has a lifespan, after which the god leaves it. This lifespan is not fixed and needs to be determined by an astrologer. Making the statues is a task that follows very rigid guidelines. The idol maker and those he employs must be of a higher caste. Each stage in the idol-making process follows certain rules and rituals. The eyes are opened at the end, when 'divine powers' enters it and it becomes a deity. Srikanda insists that it is not the spirit of god residing in the statue, but rather the deity itself, maintaining that it is faith that gives life to a sculpture, without which, it is lifeless. This unique tradition is now threatened, the work is hard and the younger generation is more intent on pursuing other careers, while businesses that make a large number of sculptures have sprung up. Such statues, Srikanda tells us, will never have a god residing in them.
Manisha Ma Bhairavi is The Lady Twilight, a tantric who lives in Tarapith, praying to the goddess Tara. While this goddess is generally depicted as a frightening slayer, for Manisha Ma, she is gentle and benevolent like a mother. The reader learns the story of Manisha Ma and how she became a tantric. We learn about various tantric practices and how tantric sex has been sold in the West, which hardly follows or understands the actual practice. Details about the followers of Tara Ma are divulged in this story, portraying them not as scary men and women, but normal people who like to follow cricket on their radios.
The last of the nine stories is The Song of the Blind Minstrel. It is the story of Kanai, a baul, which in Bengali means 'possessed' or 'mad.' They live lives that run contrary to what the society dictates -- smoking ganja, singing and dancing, following certain practices of sex, philosophy and the belief that God is right here inside every person seeking the truth; a life that requires you to be on the road, have a guru and always follow the path of love. William Dalrymple refers to them as near atheists and humanists. The story of Kanai is once again one of belief guiding his steps at a young age as he sets out to become a baul. His companion Debdas belongs to a high caste Hindu family and decides to become a baul, rejecting everything his family taught him.
All characters in this book are uniquely rich; each has his or her own story, many of them face hardships and pain before finding through faith, their way to connect to God. They believe that their beliefs lead them to God and that it is their God who protects them and guides them. Call it chance, coincidence or destiny, but each one of them has found peace and joy on the path they chose to follow. |
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