Strangers in California

oh my god it is AWESOME STORY

Dear Amrita
A wonderful piece of work I must say, I am not a literary critic like most of the readers I find here are. I enjoy the literature for literature`s sake and my response to your story `Strangers In California`` is that it is simply great. The way you captivate the reader is how a story teller should go about. A simple thing in Punjabi to say ( if u understand Punjabi) that ``Gall wichon gall nikkalni chaidi hai``(one thing should lead to another) and that is exactly what ur story did. Keep it up and give us more such wonderful stories.

Amrita Rajan,

Pain as a silently illuminated wish. Seeking meaning to completion of the self. Coincidences. Seeking, above all. Finding the sought after. Contentment. Bliss.

Peace!

Some more random thoughts on vern lit till this board is alive,the relation with vern lit and poltical movement goes as far as the days of Buddha and Vardhman, they used Pali for their teachings as opposed to Sanskrit.Coz language has always been a tool for the elite to create chasms and preclude a section of society from literature. Similarly,later poets like Kabir,Sur, Tulsi etc. did not write in Persian or Sanskrit, which were the elitist languages of their times.
Now back to post independence, in the absence of an adequate commercial structure, Hindi lit (I am refraining from using vern lit now) has been kept alive and visible (besides the Sahitya Academy and by the effort of individual writers), by ,father figures like Agyeya and Naamvar Singh etc. who did great jobs of editing and printing anthologies, and by the small magazines movement.Small magazines are still aplenty, but there is absence of a father figure now. This can be a reason.
Secondly, there has been a disillusionment from Nehruvian socialism among the youth and the youth today are more tilted towards the right or center than towards the left. So, Hindi lit, which has,post independence had a distinct egalitarian and leftist spin,has found less takers.This probably also gives rise to what Amrita calls resentment towards literay pinkos, who are perceived to be leftist and in many cases, are.
Further, the dalits today have more political power than before and the upper castes do not have it as easy as they used to.They have to work and study harder for their living. So, on the one hand, dalit participation in lit has increased, particualrly in maharashtra, due to the legacy of mahatma phule and ambedkar, and on the other hand, colleges coffee rooms and canteens are no longer the hub of literary discussions as they used to be.

dL:

am still searching for that essay The Onion Eater... anNy found it for me...and lost it...or it is packed in some trunk far away from where she is now...


rahul/amrita:

...if you guys know of this essay... i would like to read it again...

lve

t

a great read thanks amrita, this conversation sounded like a few ive had. not that my hsband was gay nor am i indian but the rets of it sounded familiar.

rahul:

...i think you have made your arguments re: coffee and amrita has made hers...my take?...first, understand am no s/s writer...but when i do, i skip the height, weight color altogether from my main characters...and try to weave a powerful story around them in a way that the reader either does not notice that these personal details are missing or they fill them in themselves...

...in Mrs. Ashfaq Munir or the Mr. is left entirely to the reader`s imagination...in From the Table...which was in reality an interact response to another story the reader again is not given physical details...in Mahajirzadeh Asadullah Khan ...again i have deliberately refrained from physical details...

...come to think of this... am not sure if i do this delberately...also...there is another powerful short story that may appear here....the protagonist is a terminally stricken women...again no mention of her physical details...and come to think of it i did not give her a name either...but am sure once someone reads that story it will be difficult to get her off one`s mind...

aur ab aapki bari hay

rgds,

t

ps: amrita #25...later

dL:

tell me;)...

...i revised the unpoet once and the that pc fried up...had it stored somewhere...but like objects that i save very carefully for future use seldom do i find them again with ease...it is there somewhere in the innards...but to look for it...while the rainbow of life offers more stimulating distractions is tough...would you mind accessing that safe haven and send a copy of it to me...i might submit it to chowk...or maybe i won`t...but i would like to have a copy...use the addy from my page...

lve

t

Hello `t`

It is indeed ``I`` or should that be ``me`` ... I think Eats, Shoots and Leaves is getting to me ... Chowk is addictive and I have so much work to do ... :)

Would you believe I found the ``unpoet`` in a back-up folder tucked away in the virtual cellars of my PC ....

Everytime I go to Pakistan I come back with reams and reams of imagery ... filled with barefoot kids ... forlorn babies ... struggling masi`s ... and oily mechanics ... and I think to myself ...

cheers
dL

Amrita

I read your post (15) and the word ``panache`` began to blink uncontrollably somewhere in my mind ... but putting it into a sentence sounded so terribly pretentious that I`ll stick to saying that was done with style ... :)

Hey Rahulmal ... c`mon ... ``coffee`` sounds so much better than ``wajibi`` ...

dL

Rahul,

You make a valid point but I can`t understand the vehemence with which you support it. Certainly the people you write of need to be represented in popular literature not as stereotypes of a certain class or function but as real, live, flesh and blood human beings. However, that can only be done by a writer who recognises them as such and who can get into the skin of those characters. Some people are more familiar with the alleys and byways of Bazar Sitaram than others and are in a better position to write of its rooftop romances and its petty intrigues, of its aspirations and its failures, than others. As Amrita says, one can only represent the people that live in one`s imagination. You cannot coerce such stories into being without willfully doing injustice to them.

---

Amrita,

You wrote of the disconnect between literature and politics. I think living in the subcontinent one is naturally mistrustful of politics and political movements. We never tire of speaking of it but at the same time are careful not to put too much hope in it considering how casually and how predictably it ignores us. Our dreams and our aspirations centre more around the tangible elements of our lives - our families, our jobs, our education. It is these proximate sources which supply us our experiences and our entertainment. Invariably these are all connected to the political situation at large but we don`t focus on that. It may be a sense of myopia but it is also a means of self-preservation, of keeping oneself sane enough to go on.

By the way, Amrita, it`s a pleasure reading your interacts.

t – digressions & other things. Thanks for the tip .

I have always noted the step-motherly treatment meted out to Urdu lit. Some years ago I read this book wherein the author makes a trip to Lucknow and is happy, thinking that he is sure to find a better selection there. To his surprise, the bookshops in Lucknow are worse than the one he visits in (I think) Delhi.

My father tells me stories of his days in Aligarh when poetry and literature were de rigueur. Some of the most explosive Urdu talent of the post independence years were his contemporaries or seniors at AMU. But his best friend’s kids who followed him and their father 30 years later have a different tale to tell. In their day the emphasis was off lit and more on politics. And AMU is not alone. The symptoms are repeated in Benares, Delhi, wherever you go. And it’s increasing by the year.

Somewhere a disconnect has occurred between lit and politics unlike say, the period lasting into the 70s when both cinema and lit were linked to marvelous effect. We have talked before of political movements promoting vern lit. I think political movements have an effect on all lit. But there is this growing distrust of lit as the realm of ‘pinkos’ who’re out to destroy the world. Mostly by people who’ve never cracked a book in their life. One of the things that I loved about my university was the political energy of its students who married it to a love of lit. There was the odd idiot, of course, but most of these people were wonderfully thoughtful and open to ideas.

I know there are people like that on the subcontinent as well. But they seem to be going more and more underground with every passing year. Gita Mehta (an author I love) wrote of the cinematic erudition of the villagers of Kerala and traffic constables of Calcutta as they ate up cinema verite and film noir. These two places keep popping up every time art is discussed in India. Surely, they can’t be the only ones with the faculty to understand it.

She wrote a story with the characters she imagined. If you don`t like it write one of your own like Ansari. I mean you can be critical of the way its written but you can`t make her choose the subject and the characters within the story. Personally being extraordinarily lazy and an extra ordinary person to boot I would at least give someone credit for coming up with more than 1000 words of fiction.

Rahul: thank you for telling me M&B heroes don’t really exist. Another thing – not everything addictive is cocaine. Romance novels are more painkillers, highly addictive but initially soothing. I understand your need to meet your equal in literature – may I suggest you seek him in genres other than standard romance? Literary fiction comes to mind. Fantasies are not evil and neither are they meant to keep people down. What of figures such as Roland? M&B did not invent the M&B hero – they merely appropriated him and took him out of his period costume. At best you could argue that the time has arrived for us in the 21st century to get over the medieval hang up in which physical appearance was a manifestation of mental being.

What is suspension of disbelief? It is what you do the moment you pick up a work of fiction or walk into a movie theater or play a video game. If you want to know more, please visit this link – http://www.milori.com/articles/image_quality_issues.asp . Tie it in to temporal’s quote of author and reader contributing to the creation of literature. Oh, and why is she thankful for her light coffee complexion? Because she’s blushing and doesn’t want him to notice. I thought it was quite clear. But even otherwise, brown is beautiful :). Are ‘we’ playing word games? ‘I’ am not.

and as for ab tumhari bari - the rage of caliban is neither new nor neglected.