N-deal, Gun mamas and other tamashas

Much Ado about nothing, as usual. The Post managed to get ahold of a sekrit!letter to the US Congress saying the US would stop supplies to India if India conducted a nuclear test. Um, didn't we already know that? What's all the hullabullo about then? Who knows? Something more for the TV channels and the opposition to yell and scream about.

Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican Convention accepting her nomination as the party's vice-presidential candidate was an unqualified success. Lots has been written about this relative unknown, particularly about her pregnant teenage daughter. But I want to highlight some articles discussing what her candidacy means for women, in a year where we seemed to come so far with Hillary. The first one is Gloria Steinem in the LA Times, which I liked, but am a little uncomfortable with. It's probably because it's Steinem, and she has so much baggage, but she puts forward what is my knee-jerk reaction to Palin quite eloquently in her article. I also appreciated that she criticised the focus on whether Palin, as a mother, should take such a consuming job. Then there's a lot of interesting stuff in Slate, particularly this piece, which draws comparisons between Michelle Obama, who I think is a kick-ass, strong woman who can be a great role model and Palin who... well, is not, IMO. Then there's this article, also from Slate, which attacks (rightly) those saying Palin is being an irresponsible mother by accepting her nomination. And of course the point she makes about the culture wars is interesting. This is yet another piece in the Guardian, which is more about the culture wars in the context of Palin's candidacy, but one I think makes some interesting points about the women's movement. And the NYT is just bitchy (in a good way!), sometimes obviously (cf: Dowd in here and here) and sometimes classily, as with Gail Collins in Sarah Palin Speaks! Salon has a great here and now analysis of the immediate politics surrounding McCain's choice. And this one analyses the new gender vs. race war.

The Day of the NYT

One of the only e-mail newsletters that I subscribe to (such as it is) and actually read is the NYT book review. It's full of such interesting essays on such a wide variety of subjects (see, for example: R U really reading? and Designing Dictators) , it makes me sad that there is no equivalent in the Indian English language press. I suppose the Hindu's monthly literary supplement comes close, but it's monthly and not very exhaustive. It also suffers from the same problem that the rest of that newspaper does: it looks boring. Deathly dull in fact. Plus, you find the same old people regurgitating the same old things. (The one exception is Pradeep Sebastian's column, which is a delight). What I love about reviews, and NYT in particular (it's my favourite, I don't really have a better reason than that) is how they can add a whole new dimension to a subject or text without one even having read/watched that particular work. It enhances my understanding in very particular, and invaluable ways and goes far beyond the it's-good-read-it type of review.

Here's a very interesting article in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars. He takes off on an editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review, cautioning journalists against the suppression of dissent in the mass media. He commends the Review for the editorial, but then goes on to pick apart an article on climate change in the same issue, which appears to suppress the dissenting view that global warming is a consequence of natural factors, and has nothing to do with human activity. The centre is of course the nature of dissent, and the nature of truth. In the debate over climate change, and indeed over contradictory science, it becomes very difficult to tell what the Truth is, and if there even is a Truth. In the absence of an established, verifiable fact (which the science of climate change - as far as I can understand it - is not, at least not yet) one is left with no other option but to believe the scientific consensus. Rosenbaum does make an important point on the distinction between the scientific truth and scientific consensus, but surely he can forgive bypassing this distinction sometimes. Particularly if that is not the focus of the article, anyway. CJR has responded to his criticism here. There's a lot more I want to say about this, but I need to gather my thoughts.

NYT also asks, Is Jon Stewart the most trusted man in America?I don't know about that, but I sure as hell trust him over Anderson Cooper. Long live The Daily Show.

And now for a bit of tab clearing:

Nicholas Baker (he of the Human Smoke) reviews Ammon Shea's experience reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary.
Yet another article from the NYT, this time asking Why We Read.
Vulture has a couple of great articles on the August movie: why they suck and a historical analysis. They also look at upcoming fall movies -- some great stuff in there, but I don't think it's going to be more depressing than last year. I mean, how could it?

Innovations, Age and other paradoxes

Grandiose as the heading of this post may be, I came across an interesting article by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in Mint today. The article, referenced an American economist on the subject of innovation. Innovation has been viewed as the domain of young, dynamic people -- as something that makes a complete break from the past. What Rajadhyaksha highlights in his column via Lawrence Summers via Schumpeter, is that it may not be accurate to assume that, these days, innovation comes from these garage-types and not from within big corporations.

According to this article, there are two kinds of innovators, as identified by David Galeson, an economist at the University of Chicago: the conceptual innovators and the experimental innovators.

Galenson says that the conceptual innovators are the finders. They make bold leaps and challenge the existing way of looking at the world and doing things. This group mostly does its best work at an early age. The experimental innovators are seekers who gradually reach their goal, taking one step at a time. Their best work usually gets done later in life.

He cites some pretty interesting examples, like Jean Luc Godard, who did his best work in his younger years and Clint Eastwood, who hit his prime as a director well into his dotage. That some, like Steve Jobs, seem to have magically transcended the divide, is also duly noted.

It's interesting to apply this sort of thinking to politics. Can a comparison be made at all? The US Presidential election, with 'Change' at its center for its younger candidate, would certainly seem to suggest so. But think of India, where all our politicians not from political dynasties are gerontocrats. Are they capable of innovation in anything except new methods of graft?

The World from a Stage

Yeah, yeah, I'm Trying to be clever but kinda not really succeeding. Anyway, I have just finished reading what is perhaps my favorite book by Bill Bryson, his biography of Shakespeare. I am a Shakespeare obsessive, and the idea of Bryson writing a book on him was very exciting and I have been wanting to get my hands on a copy since I read the first review. But this has surpassed all expectations. It is a slim book, about 200 pages, but there's so much information packed into it. Not only did I learn about Shakespeare, and how little we really know about him, but also about the times in which he lived.

Some things were awe-inspiring - like where we are now with communication technology and printing as compared to Shakespearan times and how much genius and how much luck it took for those plays to survive 400 - odd years. There are other things too, when Bryson describes life in Elizabethan London, some passages could almost be talking about Delhi. That got me thinking about the dichotomy of the times we live in. Most of us have indoor plumbing but this country still has to deal with a citizenry with perhaps the same level of awareness that masses in London in the 16th century had. It's a tough line to toe and maybe explains several of our problems.

Coming back to William Shakespeare, Bryson addresses the thorny question of authorship and builds a very convincing argument for the plays having been written by precisely who we think it was written by. Personally, I believe he is right - in my very uninformed opinion of course. I'm no literary detective. The biography is a gem, even if you're not in the least bit interested in Shakespeare. Bryson's Shakespeare is sort of a guide to life in the 16th and 17th centuries in England. It makes for fascinating reading, especially the popularity of the theatrein those times, and interesting facts, like that in Shakespeare's day, 40% of women got pregnant before they got married. Shakespeare is almost a bonus. He is in the book as in life (as Bryson puts so beautifully) "the literary equivalent of an electron, forever there and not there."

Texas and Ohio

So, Hillary Clinton is back in the race! This is very much of the good. I truly believe she's the better candidate at this point in time, she has the experience and the policies. There's lots of good stuff around the Internet on the gender vs. race question as well as on the primaries. NYT's Maureen Dowd, who has in recent times ripped Hillary Clinton apart in not nice ways, raises an important point when she says here:

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts. People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

While I disagree with her on many counts, not least the extremely snide way in which she derides the Clinton campaign, I think this is a very important point and one that is aiding the Republicans more than anything. While the Democrats are busy fighting amongst themselves, John McCain has formally won the Republican nomination. This means that he can now start campaigning for President - a hell of a head start.

There are also other, very interesting pieces. Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post has argued that if Clinton loses the nomination it will have more to do with things other than her two X chromosomes. The most intriguing piece for me was this one, from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. The blogger, Monica Guzman, argues from a perspective I think many young women my age will be familiar with. We take so many things for granted as women that our mothers and grandmothers had to fight to achieve. And so in a large way in our day to day lives are removed from the issue of gender, and this, I imagine, holds true particularly for women living in developed liberal societies. But I don't agree (entirely) with her concluding thoughts:

That voters can see beyond gender when picking a candidate should serve as reward to the generation who fought so hard to make that possible.

I think her earlier paragraph contradicts this. She says:

But a female presidency, like a black one, will reflect a truly equal world only when the candidate's gender or race is as important as his or her hair color -- which, ironically, is when the fewest people will notice. That gender is an issue in this campaign should remind all us young women that the battle is not yet won.

More on the Democratic identity politics can be found here, in an excellent analysis of how much the race vs gender campaign is hurting the Democrats. And this piece on CiF should be read for different reasons entirely. The second comment is a good response, so I don't want to say much. Except I will link to this absolutely no-holds-barred indictment of all the people - liberals and otherwise - intent on either dismissing gender as a factor in the elections or arguing that its somehow less of an issue than race. And here is yet another excellent Washington Post piece on how much Hillary's candidacy means to women voters.

Fake Reading, What Fun!

A book just waiting to be written: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read?, by Pierre Bayard. This French author’s previous book, Who killed Roger Ackroyd, was an examination of Agatha Christie’s crime novels. Now, he’s written a book on talking about the must-read book, even if you haven’t read it, thus removing any opportunity to be embarrassed in an important social setting. Bah, spoilsport. The practice of exposing a fraud is immensely satisfying, if only to prove to oneself how extremely well read one is, and to even attempt to dilute this experience is rather perverse of Bayard.

Most of us, of course, if we are honest at least with ourselves, claim to have read many more books than we actually have. Life expectancy may have gone up considerably since James Joyce wrote Ulysses, but it is still not long enough to have actually read it. Bayard makes the point that it is possible to have an informed literary opinion of a book without having read it cover to cover. It takes little more than one page to determine an author’s writing style, after all. Certainly enough to gather whether or not one needs to bother with the rest of it.

The core of Bayard’s thesis is that there is no obligation to read, and that his book will help free people of the psychological guilt of not having read, say, Remembrance of Things Past or Middlemarch. According to Bayard, ambiguity is the key when talking about things one doesn’t know in detail. A reader’s “personal relationship” should come through when talking about the book. A confession here. Bayard’s book is only available in French. I don’t speak that language. But Bayard can hardly fault me for not reading his book, can he? Even his publishers understand the inherent paradox in his book. So is it smarter to read it, or not? That, fellow bibliophiles, is the big question.

Some interesting reading

I read a piece in the Indian Express today that articulated rather well what I think of this Ram Setu mess. Some things I want to highlight:

"The relevance of myths is the stuff history is made of. Karen Armstrong, in one of her lesser-known works has spoken at length of the importance of myths through human history. Even Marxist historians like the legendary D.D. Kosambi in his book, Myth and Reality talk of collective memories of a people. Eric Hobsbawm goes as far as to talk of how the evolution of modern nation states wouldn’t have been possible but for collective myths that people held onto, which led to national identities being formed."

And....

"The debate so far, has been focused on where the state must not tread. But in a multi-cultural society, with as many beliefs, it is also important to establish when the state must not shy away from playing the role of a neutral umpire. The secular Indian state has consciously allowed its citizens to keep their faith, practice and propagate it too, but not when it interferes with someone else’s freedom."

In other news, Times Select (by the New York Times) is now free. So we can all read what the likes of Paul Krugman and Roger Cohen have to say.

Also, Paul Krugman has just started blogging at the NYT website. Whether or not one agrees with him, he's always an interesting writer, because he is amazingly direct and coherent in his arguments. He is pretty persuasive as well, its only a little after I've finished reading what he's written that I can find points of departure for myself.