Girl Power

This new girl power thing is perhaps the worst version of feminism I've ever seen. You know the one? The I-m-a-girl-with-all-my-precious-girlie-ways, and I watch sex and the city, and I-go-learn-pole-dancing-because-Im-such-a-badass, version.
There's a baby-teen version too and its evident in the marketing of the 'Little Princess Culture' that will encourage girls to grow into self-obsessed brats. The kind who go on TV to talk about what strong and beautiful women they are.
I'm a woman and I'm crying on TV because I've lost so much weight and had a makeover. Makeover, makeover, makeover. I have a right to look sexy and pretty and h o t.
I'm a princess. And I better not look a day older than 45.
Let me be seen deriving no satisfaction from any pursuit that does not involve me flogging my tired sexuality, legs, face or hair. I'm sick to death of it, I'm sick of my friends talking about it, I'm sick of being marketed products that promise to fix it all so I can be the woman I was always meant to be, I'm going to stamp on the credit card meant EXCLUSIVELY for today's woman and jump up and down like a mad feminist, Yeah.

Anyway, mid-rant I came across this interesting bit of information from the New York Times that makes me wonder about the roles we take on:

According to a study of how children ages 5 to 13 spend their time, by Isabelle Cherney and Kamala London, psychologists at Creighton University and the University of Toledo, respectively, and published in the journal Sex Roles, girls tend to become less stereotypical in their play as they age — choosing more neutral toys, sports and computer games — while boys remain emphatically masculine in theirs. There was one exception to that trend: television-watching. The viewing habits of girls become strikingly more feminine in their tween years.

Whether girlie or girlist, girls, because they’re allowed more latitude in their identities, can still be girls: Boys, on the other hand, must be boys — unless no one is watching. In another study of younger children, Cherney and London found that if ushered alone into a room and told they could play with anything, nearly half the boys chose “feminine” toys as often as “masculine” ones, provided they believed nobody, especially their fathers, would find out. That made me question whether any more expansive vision of girlhood can survive without a similar overhaul of boyhood, which, apparently, is not in the offing.

Evidence of Things Unseen

I discovered the novelist Richard Ford in a university library in Los Angeles some seven years ago. The emotional lives of his somewhat lost characters with their moral quandaries and vulnerabilities drew me in. I learned much later that he enjoyed a long friendship with Raymond Carver , that they commented on each other's work, drew inspiration from each other...though Ford says he learned more from Carver than the other way around.
There's an excellent interview with Ford in the latest Granta (No. 99) where he talks about his work, literature and life. An excerpt:

Tim Adams: Has faith or church-going ever had any appeal to you?
Ford: Not church going. But faith, well... There's the famous line in Hebrews 11: 'Faith is the evidence of things unseen.' I've always been attracted to that line. But for specifically irreligious reasons. I deem that line to be a line about the imagination. I could almost say that, 'the imagination is the evidence of things unseen.' But again specifically I'd say that my 'faith' lies in the imagination and in the imagination's power to bring into existence essential experience that heretofore wasn't known to exist.

Adams: That reminds me of Franck Bascombe's line: 'The unseen exists and has properties.' Do you have an ongoing sense of that 'unseen,' or only at certain charged moments?
Ford: I don't think much about the unseen. For lack of great erudition, or a great education, I suppose I've stored a fair amount of trust in my instinct. But as soon as I see that written down I start to think that instinct may just be another word for luck and for trusting to luck -- which I've done. A favourite line I repair to is by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who said: 'We have a built-in, very potent, hair-triggered tendency to find agency in things that are not agents.' I'm not sure if Dennett approves of that tendency or not. But certainly that's one of the things literature does-- it ascribes agency where before no agency was noticed: it says this causes that, this is a consequence of that, etc. It may be that writing fiction, imagining agencies, is my most trusted way into the unseen.

What does art do?

Talking about art in Saigon got me thinking about art in general. How artists are treated is a pretty good barometer of where a society is headed. And from what I ve been reading over the last couple of years, India isn't doing so well in that respect. First, they drove MF Husain out of India, then some right wing idiot rolled up at at Baroda's prestigious fine arts university and attacked a student artist. If you thought they would arrest the right winger, well what do you know, they arrested the student instead..this was in 2007.
Even now, when I visited, I found the pluralistic Hinduism I knew had slowly but surely given way to various shades of Hindutva--a very curious and spurious mixture of fascist methodology and puritanism.
There were things that made me hopeful, a few reviews of new art and artists; women trained in traditional dance presenting contemporary modern pieces where once there was only orthodoxy--these things were encouraging.
Historian and critic John Berger has a wonderful explanation that tells you why art is important. (I found all his books in a second-hand book shop in Bangalore and was therefore reminded of him)
"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour."

Seen in Saigon

In Saigon, I encountered mass produced art on a scale I have seldom seen before. On all our travels, we (my travelling companion and I), usually buy something by a local artist. It's not what we set out to do, but something usually catches his eye or mine and then we buy it and wrap it with much care and cart it back home so it can find its rightful place on some wall in our house. The only thing we bought this time was a print of an old propaganda poster from the war. My eyes are drawn to tourist art for its mawkish sentimentality and also because it tells you what the mood of a place is, what its gearing up for.
In Vietnam, the mood is commerce. What sells, multiplies. So, yes there were many portraits of women in cone-shaped straw hats. That's fine. What wasn't fine were portraits of Vietnamese women --all the same except for different background colours--I guess you were meant to choose whatever would go with your colour of wall of furniture. Even stranger were the copies of Western artists which seemed almost to outnumber the hats and women--hundreds of copies of Klimt's The Kiss, Botero's rotund women and anything else that has ever graced a museum. Maybe we were looking in the wrong places or even the wrong city, because Hanoi is said to be a city teeming with original, contemporary Vietnamese art with its unique European influences. Apart from a cathedral and a post office, Saigon's city centre is rapidly giving way to the standard issue glass-chrome-steel high rise.
The main shopping area, Dong Khoi, is a snarl of silk and lacquer, the new malls flash the names Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Cavalli at you. Inside, uniformed and delicately-featured salesgirls look flustered as a man in a British accent, slows down his speech and asks for trousers in a "b i g g e r" size. So, here it is the new Vietnam and its open for business, just like anywhere else.

The Other Person of The Year

I'm not sure Time magazine holds the kind of sway it did even a decade ago, but the choice of Putin as person of the year has clearly brought the magazine some much needed publicity. Garry Kasparov's oped in the Wall Street Journal shows how this choice is an endorsement of dictatorship. The magazine has made some weak justifications. Apparently, the Person of the Year is just somebody who made the news a lot, it doesn't mean that the person is good or a great leader or any such thing.

"The most revealing moment in Ms. Rice’s comments came when the topic of Mr. Medvedev as the next president was first broached. The official transcript reads:

“SECRETARY RICE: Well, I guess, they’re still going to have an election in March. ” (laughter)
Perhaps my sense of humor was dulled during the five days I spent in a Moscow jail last month for protesting against these sham elections. Or maybe it was reading about the constant persecution of my fellow activists across the country that did it. Madam Secretary went on to speak approvingly of Mr. Medvedev, making the undemocratic nature of his selection sound like a minor annoyance. The last remaining element of democracy in Russia, the transition of power, will be destroyed. Will Mr. Putin and his successor still be welcomed with open arms in the club of leading democracies?
In the early days of our opposition activities last year, when members of Other Russia were harassed and arrested, the “bright siders” in the West said it could be worse. Later, when our marchers were badly beaten in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Mr. Putin’s fans in the West said at least the police weren’t killing us in the streets.
Last week, 22-year-old opposition activist Yury Chervochkin died in hospital after several weeks in a coma. He had been beaten nearly to death an hour after making an anxious cellphone call to our offices saying he was being followed by members of the organized-crime task force known as UBOP, which has become the vanguard of the Kremlin’s war on political opposition. A witness saw him clubbed repeatedly by men with baseball bats.
Yury’s sin was not chanting Nazi slogans or praising the deeds of Josef Stalin, activities that regularly go unremarked in Russia these days. No, he had been caught throwing leaflets that read “The elections are a farce!” That was enough to make him a marked man. Now, for agitating for real democracy in Russia, he is dead.

This is a good opportunity to remember Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who was murdered on Oct. 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday. The police investigation into this infamous assassination has stalled and talk of it has died down. The Kremlin is counting on the same thing happening with “minor” cases like that of Yury Chervochkin."

The Race Row

I've been trying to make my mind up about the Martin Amis race row in the UK and what it means for the larger debate on Islamism.
Amis made some pretty incoherent declarations in an interview, where after the failed plot to blow up transatlantic planes in August 2006, he said felt 'a definite urge' to argue that British Muslims in general 'must suffer' for the actions of suicide bombers 'until they got their house in order'. By suffering, he meant 'strip searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan', 'not letting them [Muslims] travel', and 'further down the road', deportation.
Amis has pointed out in rebuttal after rebuttal that this is not a problem about race. "It's about ideology," he said. To his detractors, he issued a letter in The Guardian where he imagined their miserable chore of "dourly assembling their diatribes, hopscotching and cherrypicking from a press interview here, a TV interview there, an essay, a short story, some gout of alphabet soup in the Daily Mail, distorting this, suppressing that, and fudging the other. They are not interested in arguments and ideas, but in staking out "positions", in sending "signals", and in flirtatiously seeking the approval of the likeminded," he said.
I don't think that Amis' pronouncements are racist. In fact, I agree with the eloquent Pankaj Mishra who says that it is barely relevant whether Amis or any other individual is racist.
"We should be more concerned about this fact: that ideas regarded as intellectually null and morally abhorrent in any other context are not only accepted and condoned but also celebrated as bold truth-telling," Mishra wrote.
He explained that the instant pundits on Islam make it seem as if the presence in our midst of people who want to kill or wound us is an unprecedented event in human history. "The fervour of the ideologue manqué makes no room for the sober fact that almost every nation-state harbours a disaffected and volatile minority, whose size varies constantly in inverse relation to the alertness, tact and wisdom of the majority population."
Mishra starts by pointing out: "Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet's billion-plus Muslims."
"Closely examined, Muslim societies briskly dissolve our complacent, parochial notions about religion, democracy, secularism and capitalism. They expose, too, the notion of a monolithic Islam pressing down uniformly on all believers everywhere as a crude caricature."
But caricatures as we know are simple. And in a baffling world, we seek the reassuring presence and utterance of simplicity.
I think that Amis's views are surprisingly simplistic, for a man of his writing talent. I'm all for debate but that's not what he's engaging in...his comments are problematic. He has since distanced himself from the remarks, calling them a 'thought experiment.' We've seen such thought experiments in action in communal riots in India. The moment you blame an entire community for the actions of a few, you make the leap from a rational view of the world to the abyss of the paranoical one.
The other thing that's missing from this debate is the role of the West in the radicalisation of Islam. Professor Terry Eagleton, the man who has been baiting Amis argues his point quite clearly :"It is an obvious point, but one still worth making, that it was our own barbarism and colonialism in the Middle East that has helped to create these situations in the first place. Amis and Hitchens have become perversely silent on the crimes of Western civilisation. Western civilisation has produced enormous advances, but not to see the darker side of that, not to see the barbarism of the West, and not to see that at a time when we are killing thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems extraordinarily naive."

Sea of Me

John Lahr has just won the Reportergirl Award for Wordsmithery. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, for your kind applause. Lahr's profile of British comedian and actor Steve Coogan in the November 5th issue of the New Yorker is very enjoyable.
Lahr says that Coogan specialises in creating characters not jokes. One such hugely popular Coogan invention was Alan Partridge -- a character, who Lahr quite brilliantly describes as "..a hapless talk-show host demoted to radio DJ, Patridge was mean-spirited, self-aggrandising, status-seeking, forever tempest-tossed in the Sea of Me."
There are many people I've interviewed who would do justice to this description.