September 30, 2009 by Sanjay.

Discussions about Pakistan are invariably problematic. If the participants are mainly American, there’s much head-shaking about Pakistan’s role in US-targeted terrorism. With Indians, there’s the inevitable nationalistic jaw-clenching about brutal invading hordes putting babies to the sword, the perfidies of Jinnah, and (if the gathering is intimate enough) how Pakistanis simply can’t be trusted. Worse than either alone are mixed groups. The prejudicial cross-infections about Pakistan that Indians and Americans can instigate in each other are scarier than MRSA on an HIV unit.

In light of the fear and loathing, encountering a truly excellent development in Pakistan is doubly pleasurable. First, because excellence, by its rarity, deserves celebration. And second, because it comes from a supposed area of unmitigated darkness. This development is a show on Pakistani television called Coke Studio. First broadcast in 2008, Coke Studio is a studio-based music show with a full orchestra and killer production values. PBS viewers of Austin City Limits and especially Soundstage will find the format familiar. However, in its second season, Coke Studio has dispensed with the studio audience. The resulting reduction of spontaneity is more than made up by the slicker production values.

So, what’s so special about Coke Studio? One way to answer that question is to see a couple of standouts. Exhibit A is the fabulous (in the classic sense of the word) Sufi itinerant Saieen Zahoor. On Aik Alif, Zahoor is accompanied by the Paki-Pop band Noori, who lend a modern smoothness to the archetypically rough-hewn mystical lyrics of Bulleh Shah, the pre-eminent eighteenth-century Panjabi Sufi. Zahoor is reputed to have left home at 13 to realize a mystic dream. Though it’s tempting to think of Zahoor as being in the mold of Delta Blues singers such as Robert Johnson, his class of illiterate, free, folk mystic has no real analog in the West. (The actual gypsy Reshma comes to mind as another exemplar. But assertively secular, singing mainly of lost loves and broken hearts, Reshma’s oeuvre is reminiscent of a Lucinda Williams.)

While I’m no reflexive fan of musical fusion, in this performance Zahoor’s dreamy raggedness and Noori’s Putomayo flavoring (“hip and saucy"!”) combine beautifully in the smoothly professional blender of Coke Studio. My translation from the Panjabi is limited by a weak grasp of the language or its melody. Yet the poet’s contemplative spirit shines through the ungainly verbiage.

The song below – Husn-e-haqiqi - is also a spiritual kafi in Panjabi, but there the resemblance ends. The words belong to Khwaja Farid, a nineteenth century poet. The singer, Arieb Azhar, is anything but a wandering mendicant. Rather, he’s a vodka-loving, Croat-Pakistani producer-musician with a definite awareness of his exotic stylishness. It will surprise nobody to learn that Huan-e-haqiqi has become somewhat of an anthem among subcontinental youth.

Though those two performances are the most interesting, Coke Studio’s episode archive is a great place to dip into a spectrum of modern Pakistani music from straight-ahead studio-folk to backup babes working over The Monkees! Anyone sampling this musical feast will undoubtedly find much to be curious about:

• Is this level of sophisticated programming emblematic of Pakistani television?
• Does the program reflect a purely urban, cosmopolitan sensibility? How does it play in Pakistani Peoria?
• How does “Pakistani music” fit with the wide and deep Indian musical tradition?
• What kind of crazily liberal Muslims were the Sufis, and did “regular Muslims (as heard and seen nightly on Fox News) IED them out of existence?

I refer anyone interested in these, and other, questions about Pakistan to the very accessible All Things Pakistan blog. For me, this musical encounter is pleasure enough.

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February 19, 2008 by Sanjay.

Who says Facebook is the biggest drain of human potential since the invention of Pacman? Why just recently, a member of my college Facebook group mentioned A Certain Ambiguity, a self-described “mathematical novel” by Saurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal. Existing these days as I do in a state of concentrated Obamanation, it’s quite unlikely that I would have otherwise encountered this enjoyable trifle.

Novels have become almost vestigial in our fictionalized reality, where Jon Stewart can get laughs merely by cocking an eyebrow as he reads transcripts of congressional hearings. But something about A Certain Ambiguity intrigued me enough that I checked it out from the local library. (Confession: anything to avoid VBA coding!)

The novel belongs to an as-yet-undiscovered literary genre I call the talkie novel. Talkie novels use a Socratic dialog (possibly an interconnected set of dialogs or even an internal monologue) to dissect a philosophical frog. Talkie novels are best read at fifteen. Talkie novels make lousy movies. Talkie novels can engender a curious type of monomania, which can lead to one being called eccentric. All in all, talkie novels should be avoided after leaving college. But done well and read at the right time, talkie novels provide a lifetime of pleasurable nostalgia.

The undisputed heavyweight champion of talkie novels, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is a meditation on quality - specifically, on its immiscibility with mainstream Western values. A Certain Ambiguity, far less ambitiously, focuses on another unstable colloid - certainty and faith. Based on its rigorous proof methodology, mathematics (indeed, all of science) implicitly asserts superiority over religion. Suri and Bal attempt to show, through the narrative structure of a novel, that the two belief systems are not as divergent as commonly understood.

So. How does the novel work? In a word, it doesn’t. Certainly not as a novel. The structure isn’t bad: the narrator, an earnest Indian undergraduate at Stanford, enrolls in a math class seemingly targeted to non-math majors. In the course of learning about Euclid’s Elements, infinite cardinalities, and consistency and completeness of formal systems, our hero uncovers the mystery of his mathematician grandfather’s unfortunate incarceration in New Jersey, changes majors, and finds the girl of his dreams. (Godel waves from a distance; Ramanujan is heard from, but not seen.)

The granddad’s story (set in 1919) is told through the creaky device of an ongoing conversation with a judge appointed to decide whether he should be prosecuted on blasphemy charges. Grandpa, a fervent rationalist and atheist, has clumsily insulted the Christian townsfolk and found himself in jail. Over a course of multiple conversations - which sound suspiciously like all-night undergraduate gabfests and nothing at all like a quasi-legal discussion, even ca. 1919 - Grandpa and the judge come to the common realization that while faith is the basis of any belief systems, only objective reason can undergird certain knowledge.

As the Stanford story (it’s less a story than an exposition, really) clunks its way through plot devices including smoky jazz clubs, intense Jews, and pragmatic all-Americans, one wishes that the authors had consider spent a summer at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Or, at the very least, attended a writing course at the “Center for Annexed Learning” (an invention of the brilliant David Sedaris available in streamed audio; advance to the 5:30 mark.) Instead, we’re left with a novel not good enough as a novel to appeal to the adult reader, and without interesting enough mathematics to appeal to the genuinely mathematically curious. On the other hand, perhaps I am being too critical. Perhaps one should think of a “mathematical novel” as of a talking dog: it doesn’t matter what it says, that it exists is amazing enough!

If you’re into boundary-stretching (e.g., post-modern) fiction, you might do better with something like Calvino’s Once on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. And if learning math on your sofa is what gives you a buzz, consider Lakatose’s masterwork: Proofs and Refutations. But if you are a sentient young ‘un interested in mathematics, A Certain Ambiguity will give you a lot to look back fondly on when you’re old, like, thirty.

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March 6, 2007 by Sanjay.

For those interested in understanding God from an academic/intellectual perspective: If this undeniably long article from last week’s NYT Magazine is to be believed, Science is finally beginning to develop plausible theories of religious belief.

Summarizing brutally, the article presents the two current evolutionary theories for why religion and God figure so uniformly in the human experience. The more linear “adaptionist” school posits that belief in God was historically good for survival:

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As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”

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The “byproductists” advance the idea that other adaptive human traits have created a teleological human impulse by happenstance:

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Atran ascribes the persistence [of theistic belief] to evolutionary misdirection, which, he says, happens all the time: “Evolution always produces something that works for what it works for, and then there’s no control for however else it’s used.” On a sunny weekday morning, over breakfast at a French cafe on upper Broadway, he tried to think of an analogy and grinned when he came up with an old standby: women’s breasts. Because they are associated with female hormones, he explained, full breasts indicate a woman is fertile, and the evolution of the male brain’s preference for them was a clever mating strategy. But breasts are now used for purposes unrelated to reproduction, to sell anything from deodorant to beer. “A Martian anthropologist might look at this and say, ‘Oh, yes, so these breasts must have somehow evolved to sell hygienic stuff or food to human beings,’ ” Atran said. But the Martian would, of course, be wrong. Equally wrong would be to make the same mistake about religion, thinking it must have evolved to make people behave a certain way or feel a certain allegiance.

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To learn what these God-friendly adaptive traits are, check out the article by a Robin Henig (a writer that I have not noticed before now). It is rich and deep enough to have been printed in a first-tier monthly.

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October 10, 2006 by Sanjay.

I recently signed up on a music exchange service called lala.com. It allows you to put up your “surplus” CDs on a “Have” list. You also create a “Want” list of CD you’d like. When a CD you want is available on another member’s Have list, that person ships it to you. Your credit card get charged $1.75. You end up with the CD, lala.com ends up with a buck, and the US postal service ends up with 75 cents. The person that shipped you the CD then receives a CD on her Want list from someone else that has it. Neat!

I am listening to the first CD I received through lala.com, by the Australian-British-Tamilian Susheela Raman. I happened to see her perform during a trip to Brighton in 2005. She has a terrifically deep voice, an attractive, if mannish, physicality on the stage, and a songbook that makes the word eclectic appear watery. On “Love Trap”, her sophomore effort, she sings compositions by, among others, Thyagaraja and Joan Armatrading plus a song from the sixties Hindi film “Yehudi”. All that accompanied by guitar, piano, drums, sax, tabla, dholak, and in case that isn’t exotic enough, Tuvan throat singing!

The worst I can say about her performance is that her Hindi diction is terribly South Indian (”chahe too aaye na aaye“). I suspect that like most Indi-pop, I’ll eventually tire of the compositional arbitrariness. But for now it’s marvellously exotic.

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September 8, 2006 by Sanjay.

For your consideration: Jim Fallows’ is a very well done blog+. The entries are entertaining and fresh, usually (though not insistently) thought-provoking, and uniformly pithy. The man is  revoltingly talented with words, especially for a non-Indian.

Another interesting, though more specialized, member of the blog pound is Sepia Mutiny. I am forever indebted to it for teaching me the truth about my inner Macaca.

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March 7, 2006 by Sanjay.

In a recent interview to the Columbia Journalism Review, Suketu Mehta says in a rather matter of fact manner that “… in India the problem isn’t getting people to talk, it’s getting them to shut up or to stick to the topic.” He isn’t being snarky, he’s literally correct.  This digressiveness is perhaps related to our love of complexity, or maybe it’s just a culturally specific type of ADHD.  But it’s certainly a defining feature of modern Indian life.

Speaking of Suketu Mehta, his book Maximum City, a love epic sung to Bombay, has rightly been called a revelation. My friend Ramarao confesses that he was “briefly obsessed” by the possible reactions of the book’s characters to its publication. What sets Maximum City apart from most travel journalism is precisely this immersiveness. A Paul Theroux approaches his subject with a post-postmodern ironic distance, a Jan Morris impressionistically, yet clinically.  On the other branch of the objective/subjective divide, a brilliantly naked memoirist like Lars Eighner is a better fit on Oprah than in Granta.  Naipaul’s travel writing, to pick another armchair philosopher favorite, is too intimately fed by the author’s id, albeit disguised by his formidable intellectual veneer.

Maximum City presents a different mode of travel writing: it’s an encystation induced by Mehta’s low-key ubiquity. In recording Bombayites’ stories he changes their lives, and his own. There must be damage, surely emotional if not social and professional.  (I don’t know if the last assertion is true, but read Mehta’s conversations with Monalisa and tell me if you don’t wonder about his wife’s reaction to the book!)  Mehta is a character in each story, but like Renoir’s river, the current goes on much the same when he leaves. The genius of this 500+ page book is how keenly we regret parting from his prostitutes, torturers, and thugs.

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December 17, 2005 by Sanjay.

Prefiguring Amartya Sen, my French boss once said that while the French are sadly addicted to complexity, Indians are terminally worse. Perhaps he’s right. (He’s often right and always entertaining. When I grow up I want to be just like Pierre’s self-image.)

Smiling and smiling (I grin idiotically when I really like something) in the dark theater while watching Syriana earlier today, I though of Pierre’s comment. Do I love Syriana largely because of its multi-threaded nigh confusing plot? After all, many of my favorite movies are similarly convoluted, including Traffic (also scripted by Syriana writer-director Steve Gaghan), Slaves of New York, the better part of Altman’s erratic oeuvre (e.g., Gosford Park, Short Cuts), Grand Canyon, etc.

I am, after all, a demographically pre-determined “product” of the post-colonial Indian educational establishment, where proving that you’re smart is as important as being smart. That’s why so many of us are argumentative Indians, virtually indistinguishably so. But that tickling of my love for complexity isn’t all. Syriana is more than perfect story-telling: it flatters our grasp of what we used to call GK, or general knowledge. Yes, I nod energetically - I know that out of work Gulf Paki as if he were my cousin. And yes - another nod - Christopher Plummer’s smarmy beltway sonnenkinder knows that he’s better than the brown pretender to the Emirate. (A colleague in product marketing sells his agenda over a cup of coffee as unconsciously. Impossible is nothing!) And we Economist-reading technorati are well-versed in the self-serving duplicities of professional patriots. I nod and smile and nod and smile…

The question thus arises: is this film a product no differently targeted than Baywatch , just at a “higher” level of socio-political consciousness? Am I being played?

Enough navel-gazing… Syriana is better than 99% of the dreck that passes for entertainment at the cineplex. See it!

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