Literary Safari

The New Yorker this week is … all about food! Yay! There are a series of first-person essays  titled “Family Dinner.” Contributors include David Sedaris and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m not even half-way through  all of them, but  really enjoyed this one:
Grandmother’s House, by Nell Freudenberger
On a flight to visit her grandmother, Nell Freudenberger. is reading Amitav Ghosh’s THE HUNGRY TIDE, which takes place in the Sunderbans region of Bangladesh or East Bengal. Farah, the woman sitting next to her, is coincidentally from the Sunderbans. The two strike up a friendship, and a couple of years later, Nell ends up visiting Farah’s family . This is a mouth-watering essay about a home-cooked meal that the author experiences. Since it takes place on the Indian subcontinent, no family meal is ever complete without a stream of relatives – aunties, uncles, and endless helpings.

I can’t wait to read more of these essays tonight.

K. and I were up in the Catskills last weekend. We spent Saturday tootling around Kingston’s (the first capital of New York) waterfront, then headed to our favorite restaurant – Ric Orlando’s New World Home Cooking.

We try to eat here at least once every six months, and every time we go, we’re amazed at how it just pops out of Rt. 212 in Saugerties, and takes you by surprise. And, we just can’t get enough of their Pan Blackened String Beans.

Now, before you dismiss this statement, let me tell you that these are not your ordinary string beans stirred around in a pan. They are delectable – the perfect balance of cooked and crunchy, of smoky and spicy … served with a sauce … don’t even get me started on the sauce! Its ingredients include paprika, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, two types of mustard, gumbo filÈ powder, and a whole bunch of nifty spices.

Sigh, once you take a bite of the first bean, you’ll be lickin’ your fingers and reaching out for … more, more, more! [Here's the recipe from the New World site.]

I wish there was a restaurant in NY that had this on their menu. It just doesn’t seem fair to have to drive that far for stringbeans. (Hey, Candle Cafe chefs – have you ever considered how good this would be for your business?)

As with many good things, this dish (it turns out to be the most-ordered on NWHC’s menu) came about quite by accident. Ric Orlando writes:

One hectic night I came up three orders short of vegetables while plating up a large table. In a moment of panic, I tossed a handful of stringbeans in the boiling pasta water to cook them lightly. Well, I re-moved them from the water a little too soon. In my rush to get them cooked and finish plating those last three dinners, I dumped the beans into the hottest skillet on handäa white-hot blackening pan laden with residual blackening seasoning. I moved them around to finish them and put them on the plate with the rest of the entrees. Nine people eating dinneränine different dishes and one topic ofconversationäthose stringbeans! The table ordered three side orders so everyone could taste them. The server exclaimed that if I didn’t put these on the menu, I was nuts! Well, there’s no changing that.

At New World this time, I also ordered a beautiful Organic Arugula and Sunflower Sprout Salad with toasted sunflower seeds, roasted red peppers, Idiazabal cheese and black mission fig vinaigrette. My salad was topped with a roasted mushroom trio. Beautiful. K. got a blackened tofu sandwich, which was pretty good too.

We pretty much rolled out of the restaurant by 3:30, full and wishing for a siesta spot. We searched for a rolling field or patch of grass on which to lie down, but couldn’t find one. So, we drove to Woodstock, in hope of making it up to the Buddhist monastery. We didn’t quite make it. Along the way, K. found a chair-hammock on the porch of a store and snuck into it for a 40-minute siesta.

Which brings me to the point of this rambling narrative. I watched a piece on tonight’s BBC News [listen to the story] about a new scheme in the hotels in the town of Sevilla, in the South of Spain, which allows tourists to rent hotel rooms for an afternoon siesta. What a brilliant idea! Especially after lunch at New World Home Cooking … or really, any place in the Hudson Valley. (Take note, Ric Orlando. There’s a barn next door to the restaurant that would have made for a perfect napping spot!)

I just finished Journey into Mohawk Country, George O’Connor’s graphic novel (:01 First Second Books, 2006) adaptation of the diary of H. M. van den Bogaert, a Dutch tradesman, surgeon, and explorer. Bogaert’s journal records his journey from the island of Manhattan through New York State to Fort Orange (now Albany) in 1634 as an agent of the Dutch East India Company. His goal: to revive the struggling fur trade for the Dutch. Along the way, he visits several castles (i.e.
villages), interacts with and meets several Native American chiefs and groups, and records his observations of “tribal” ways.

Bogaert was only 23 during these travels, and O’Connor captures his youth, inexperience, and impressions aptly with his engaging illustrations and striking visual style. I really enjoyed reading the word-for-word journals alongside O’Connor’s interpretation.

The Mohawk territory that Bogaert sees is frozen, cold, and challenging. Sometimes it’s dangerous too, since guides are not always available and the
terrain is unfamiliar. Yet, there’s a warmth with the hospitality of the
Indians he meets along the way. The graphic novel format helped me really
see the world through his eyes. I was repeatedly struck by the lack of
judgment in the writing – somehow I expected a 1634 explorer to record the
native ways with stronger opinions – he didn’t. And, that’s not a function
of O’Connor’s selective adaptation of the journals. In his introduction, he
writes, “None of his entries have been altered or abridged; all is as Van
den Bogaert recorded it.” (I read an excerpt on amazon of the journal published in its plain-text form just for comparison’s sake, and it was fun to see the difference that the addition of images makes to the experience of reliving this historical event.)

Very cool. What makes it even more fascinating is the fact that this diary
is the the earliest European account of the natives in what is now upstate
New York.

This book is on the ALA’s Best Graphic Novels for Young Adults 2007 list. I
can see why. O’Connor successfully brings a primary source to life for even
the most reluctant reader of historical documents.

Here’s a sample page. For more, go to the publisher :01 First Second’s website.

I love quizzes. At work, I’ve been trying to figure out how to create a quiz for teens about survival – not just survival in the wilderness, but also survival in daily life. I’d like for the quiz to emphasize the qualities of a survivor – patience, humor, willingness to take risks, the ability to focus on the present, etc. etc. I’m also toying with the idea of creating a survivor board game. I’ve never actually written a board game, so that would be a first. Any ideas, please send them my way. Meanwhile, my colleague told me about this quiz at the Economist’s website:

Indian independence quiz
Dust off your Gandhi cap in celebration of 60 years’ sovereignty.

I was a history major in college, and focused on South Asian history, but sadly only scored an 8 out of 12. 8 is for Pukka: You have not missed your tryst with destiny. And you know what we mean. Yes, I do know what they mean. If you don’t, click here.

Happy Independence Day to India! I had ambitious aims of listing and reading all the coverage of this anniversary today, but that didn’t happen. So, I will point you instead to a complete roundup of stories at the SAJA Forum here.

My day began with this NPR interview [listen/read] with Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid, and their reflections on Pakistan. Most interesting to me, a grandchild of partition, whose parents have never seen the place – Sind – where their parents were born … was the authors’ descriptions of the cities of Lahore and Karachi. How I wish I could go to Karachi and Hyderabad one of these days.

Pretty much every news outlet ran some sort of story about this anniversary today – many US papers, including USA Today, just ran AP and Reuters stories, I did notice. However, the NY Times had this look at the changing high school political science textbooks by Somini Sengupta: “Politics is the Real Star of Indian Classrooms.”

In a country where rote learning has prevailed even at the most elite schools, the new emphasis on critical thinking signals a major shift in pedagogy. More striking is the substance of the new curriculum. Before, the emphasis in political science was on political theory. “This is realpolitik,” Ms. Malik said.

The Indian politics textbook, for instance, mentions several highly controversial political events of the recent past, from emergency rule under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s to the attacks on Muslims in Gujarat just five years ago.

Chapter Four asks students to “identify two aspects of India’s foreign policy that you would like to retain and two you would like to change,” with supporting reasons.

The last chapter asks the class to trace the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which is the country’s principal opposition party today, since the emergency era.

It will be interesting to see how the response to critical literacy in the teaching of recent history evolves in coming months. I’m guessing this will not be without controversy.

Finally, my day ended with a concert of sorts. Every year, since we were little schoolgirls in India and even after we moved to the U.S. during our adolescence, my sister and I have this tradition of singing the Indian national anthem together on Independence Day.

Today, we carried the torch forward when we sat together on the rug in my mother’s living room and heartily sang for my 6-month old nephew Nikhil. My sister propped him up on his chubby little legs and lay his hand on his head, in a salute. He cooperated for a brief moment before plopping down, but … what an attentive audience he was. No complaints when we stumbled over the words or went off-key. Thank you Nikhil!

Composed by my favorite Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, this anthem is not without controversy. I wouldn’t be doing my job of diligent informant if I didn’t point you to it. Here you go.

Jana gaṇa mana adhināyaka jaya hē
Bhārata bhāgya bidhātā
Pañjāba Sindhu Gujarāṭa Marāṭhā
Drābiḍa Utkala Baṅga
Bindhya Himācala ẏamunā Gaṅgā
Ucchala jaladhi taraá¹…ga
Taba śubha nāmē jāgē
Taba śubha āśisa māgē
Gāhē taba jaya gāthā
Jana gaṇa maṅgala dāyaka jaya hē
Bhārata bhāgya bidhātā
Jaya hē jaya hē jaya hē
Jaya jaya jaya jaya hē

O! Dispenser of India’s destiny, thou art the ruler of the minds of all people.
Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, the Maratha country,
in the Dravida country, Utkala (Orissa) and Bengal;
It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas,
it mingles in the rhapsodies of the pure waters of Jamuna and the Ganges.
They chant only thy name.
They sing only the glory of thy victory.
They seek only thy auspicious blessings.
The salvation of all people waits in thy hands,
O dispenser of India’s destiny!
Victory, Victory, Victory, Victory to thee

Final note: I tried singing the other competing anthem Vande Mataram later, on my drive home, but kept hearing Lata Mangeshkar, the nightingale of India’s voice – and just had to stop myself. Even Nikhil couldn’t have handled that!

I’ve been looking for an entire issue of a publication devoted to India’s 60th independence anniversary, and was thrilled to find this from The Guardian Unlimited. Here’s the entire TOC.

The new India: a special issue

I’ve been looking for an entire issue of a publication devoted to India’s 60th independence anniversary, and was thrilled to find this from The Guardian Unlimited. Here’s the entire TOC.

Bangalore: The making of a miracle
In 1947 it was a provincial outpost. Today it’s the most globalised city in India. Ian Jack reports from the boom town of Bangalore.

IT workers in India: How did India do it?
The rise of a new global force.

‘The arrival of a golden age’
Randeep Ramesh spent his childhood apologising for having any connection with India. But how times change …

Gandhi : A father betrayed
These days, India’s corrupt politicians don’t pay much attention to the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, writes Ramachandra Guha.

The best and worst of times
Indian families from across the social divides describe how their lives have changed.

The cult of the sex goddess
‘Female empowerment’ is a government slogan and a woman is head of state, but women in India are still second-class citizens, argues Sagarika Ghose.

Death of the small town
As the young head for excitement and prosperity in the big cities, small centres of population are in decline. Pankaj Mishra on a vanishing culture.

The ‘poor’ neighbour
India is seen as a success story, while Pakistan is written off as a failed state and the hiding place of Osama bin Laden. What went wrong? By William Dalrymple.

How Pakistanis see India
Kamila Shamsie: India and Pakistan exist primarily in each other’s imaginations, and our reactions to each other continue to be based on old psychological wounds.

How Bangladeshis see India
Tahmima Anam: We cannot love India. The relationship is too unequal for romance, and our neighbour is too aggressively self-interested to be embraced as a generous parent.

NPR is doing a series on India/Pakistan’s anniversary. Today, an interview with Bernard Dineen, a Briton who served as a young captain in the Punjab Boundary Force that was charged with the impossible task of keeping order. Listen.

In Guardian Unlimited, Siddharta Deb is writing a week-long series on India and Pakistan. Today, he considers the legacy of empire in Indian literature on post colonial literature. Read it.

On the BBC website, I watched these moving video interviews:

• A man from Ipswich remembers the impact of partition on his family. Watch.
• A teenager traces her family’s partition story and returns to India to talk to her grandmother. Watch. (This is the first in a series this week as well.)

There’s also a wonderful piece – an interview with three generations of a Muslim family that chose to stay in India post-Partition. Read.

I’ve tried talking to both my grandmothers about their experiences during partition, but I’ve never been able to get a full picture. Neither of them was in Sindh (then part of India, now Pakistan) at the time. So, I hear about relatives, including my great grandparents, who left Karachi and went to refugee camps in Gujarat and ultimately ended up in Baroda; about Hindus and Muslims turning their backs on one another after centuries of communal coexistence, and about the loss of wealth, possessions, homeland.

It’s strange how something so real can be so blurry in our family memory. Sometimes pain seeks to be erased rather than remembered, I guess. Still, I wish I could reconstruct the events of those days.

When I heard the BBC piece about the teenager seeking her family history today, I was inspired. Along the way, I did find an ambitious website Sindhi Exodus, which features oral history narratives of refugees from Sindh.

In this week’s Economist, a worthy opinion piece on on how changes in technology are making the always-tired cliché increasingly untrue: “Plus ça change? Not quite.”

Clichés … often act as a linguistic fossil record, preserving objects and behaviour that have long since fallen into petrified obsolescence. Industrious sorts no longer burn the midnight oil. … In a technological age ever more clichés are being untethered from their origins in this way. … Thanks to reviews, awards and celebrity book-club stickers, you can in fact judge a book by its cover. If you carry a mobile phone, write e-mail or post entries on MySpace, being out of sight does not mean being out of mind. And in the age of the iPod, no one can be accused of being unable to carry a tune. … Being archaic does not always make a cliché redundant. People still jump on bandwagons, read the riot act, burn the candle at both ends and keep irons in fires. As long as its meaning is clear, a saying can be both historic and current. … The trouble comes when technology robs a cliché of its substance as well as its form. … if once it was believed that the camera never lied, PhotoShop should have taught that the lens bends the truth as effortlessly as it bends light itself. …

Read the complete piece.

Plus, for your enjoyment, since any discussion of cliches is really not complete without pausing to reflect upon the use of language in politics … a comic from the Lincoln Journal Star, by Neal Oberman.

In the U.K. there seems to be a bit more activity whirling about the the publishing world over the upcoming 60th anniversary of India’s indepencence. Another interesting book that was recently released is Vishnu’s Crowded Temple, by Maria Misra.

From the review in The Guardian:

Misra, who teaches modern history at Oxford, has undertaken an ambitious project. She attempts to telescope more than 150 years of India’s history into this book and tries to show, as she tells us in its closing pages, ‘how India has developed its peculiar form of modernity, the most striking feature of which is its highly atomised, fragmented and diverse citizenry’. [Read the full review.]

The book seems to be centered around two sections on Gandhi and Nehru, with the author extremely critical of Gandhi’s ways and ideology, and approving of Nehru’s “internationalist” philosophy. As the years go by and historical accounts of India’s independence movement emerge, the critical accounts of Bapuji are multiplying.

On August 15, 60 years will have passed since India gained independence from British rule. August 15th is also my grandfather’s birthday (though he was, of course, born a few decades before 1947). I thought I’d mark the upcoming anniversary by keeping tabs on India-related stories and features that catch my eye over the next several days. If I’m inspired, I’ll do more than just keep tabs. Let’s see.

So, today’s picks:

1) “Exit Wounds” – Pankaj Mishra’s review of Indian Summer, by Alex von Tunzelmann in this week’s New Yorker. The book cover at right must be the British edition. That image is so much more evocative than the U.S. edition I saw at Barnes and Noble last weekend.

2) Speaking of Pankaj Mishra, courtesy of the NYT literary blog Paper Cuts comes a weekly series “Living with Music”that features authors’ playlists. What a great idea. Of music, Mishra said:

“I find it impossible to listen to music while writing, but I cannot imagine traveling or indeed almost doing anything else, without it. And nothing matches music’s ability to create specific moods, or briskly evoke places and times remote from me.”

And, here’s a bit of Pankaj Mishra’s playlist:

• Sand Mandala, Philip Glass. Travelling in Tibet recently, I found this hypnotic opening from the Martin Scorsese’s film “Kundun” a very congenial companion.

• Greensleeves, John Coltrane. In his experimental phase, which greatly annoyed Philip Larkin, Coltrane produced many distinguished failures such as “India” and“Brazilia.” Playing soprano sax here, he makes this traditional English ballad swing.

• Gulon Mein Rang Bhare, Mehdi Hasan: This elegant rendition of a ghazal by one of the subcontinent’s greatest poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz is a perennial favorite.

• Overjoyed, Mary J. Blige. Her rich, soulful voice gives this Stevie Wonder classic a new edge. Perfect for bus rides in summer-bright London.

• Bahon Mein Chale Aao, Lata Mangeshkar. A cover version in the movie “The Namesake” renewed my memory of this old, wonderfully melodious song by the “Nightingale of India.” The music is by R.D. Burman, one of Bollywood’s greatest composers, who had a genius for blending disparate-seeming traditions.

3) On the Leonard Lopate show, an interview with author and film critic Anumpama Chopra about her new book King of Bollywood, which is all about Shah Rukh Khan and the rise of Bollywood. Asks Leonard Lopate: “Why is SRK bigger than Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise combined? “Her answer:

“What SRK has done is basically captured the new India – he is the face of the new urban India, the post-liberalization India. It’s a country full of hope which is slowly emerging as an economic superpower. His films basically reflect that. They’re all about consumption, about beautiful people in beautiful places. He has really become the repository for all those dreams of all of us who are taking baby steps into a new world. … He tells us all that we can enjoy the material comforts of the West without letting go of what we believe is special, the traditional Indian values. He always manages to combine both. “

I’m not sure I agree with that statement. But, it’s a fascinating interview. I’m always so pleased with Leonard Lopate’s questions. Listen.

4) New Ramayana video games forthcoming, from Sony and Virgin Comics. Press Release.

5) “India Develops a Nose for Wine” – a piece by Somini Sengupta in the International Herald Tribune. I was tickled by this piece because just last week, while having dinner with a (non-Indian) friend, I had a conversation that went along the following lines:

Friend: Do Indians drink wine? Is wine an Indian drink?
Me: Not so much.
Friend: So, what would you call an Indian drink?
Me: Whiskey.

I said that because I remember my grandfather with his Black Label.

And, I quote from Sengupta’s piece:

Vijay Kumar Ahuja, a maker of printing materials, said he was drawn to wine when a friend, who happened to be sitting across the table this evening, served it at his daughter’s wedding eight years ago. The following year, Ahuja served wine at his own sons’ weddings. More recently, he took a chance and presented a bottle of Barolo to a high-value business client. Two days later, Ahuja got a call from the man’s wife, thanking him.

Ahuja took that as a sign of changing times. In certain circles, he concluded, good wine makes a difference. Before he would never have considered serving or giving anything but whiskey.

“What whiskey are you serving, that’s what mattered,” Ahuja recalled.

No matter the buzz about wine, Indian taste buds are notoriously hard to change, and Subhash Arora, the founder of the wine club, said he had given up trying to convert the “hard-core whiskey drinker.”

“At the end of the day,” he said, regretfully, “they want the ‘nasha’ ” – Hindi for “intoxication.”

That’s all folks – for today.

My cousin Soneela Nankani is playing the lead in a Fringe Festival offering which opens next week. I’m excited and proud of her.

Sona is cast as Caitlin, the explorer. “She was the type of arts student that wears a scarf indoors, uses a magic eight ball as a balcock and sprinkles ‘discourse’ into sentences like a condiment. All the signs should have pointed to ‘pass’, and yet there was something about her…..”

Show details:

Cherry Lane Theatre Mainstage
38 Commerce Street, New York, NY 10014

Today is the day that Penguin (UK) launches its MY COVER series. Classics printed with blank covers for you (and me and anyone else who wants) to illustrate. It’s all about interactivity.

From The Guardian:

Inspired by their favourite novels, six musicians have illustrated the books with their own artwork for a “design your own cover series” project for the publisher Penguin.

Razorlight have stuck a cover on The Great Gatsby, Ryan Adams has slapped oil paint on Dracula and Beck has line drawn his take on The Lost Estate. Dragonette, Mr. Hudson & The Library and Goldspot have also sewn, graffitied or collaged a cover for their favourite Penguin Classic.

Other titles include Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Great Gatsby, and Animal Farm.

Penguin will create a gallery of reader illustrations on their website. Pretty cool! Too bad it’s only available in the UK right now.

Update: I was mistaken. Penguin has partnered with Piczo in the U.S. Only here it’s an online contest to design covers for their favorite books. More here. I still prefer the U.K. version of being able to buy the book in a store and physically design it.