Anapneo

Role of a lifetime-“A Bra burning and Chappal throwing feminist”

Never thought I would be asked to fill in the shoes of a bra burning /chappal throwing hard core feminist. It came to me by pure chance! The English department of the Mumbai University is hosting an international seminar on ‘Resistance literature’. And for the cultural events on the fourth day we decided to do a poetic drama titled CRACKED IMAGES, FROZEN FRAMES (first read at Prithivi Theatre –Mumbai on 6th March 2000) by one of our own professor Dr.Sridhar Rajeswaran. I was asked to choose a role and out of the three characters- doctor, patient and companion –I opted for the companion. And then we started to read out the lines for the very first time. Here is a sneak preview of my lines;

“Do something!
Open your ****ing eyes
I cannot cope with your being like this
I left you all right
But did you not deserve it?
You drove me to it.
You and your racing
Your car hurtling downhill as though to break the sound barrier…..”

…..
“You and your flashes of brilliance.
Epileptic discharge of mutilated cells
Self-titillating intellectual
Masturbating passionate living
With angels in the void of a library
At least they are all dead.”
…..
“You know well why I stopped
The sexual and the political are so commingled
By the fact of our very existence
Bodily time is species time
The sexual and the political
Are they not part of body processes?
Is not private and public spaces intertwined?
Break your old icons
Of virgin mother and nurturing whores.”

…..

We are having so much fun!

We also started discussing whether we still need a kind of 'radical feminism’ in the world today. Two opposing views emerged. One side arguing that ‘radical feminism’ was the need of the hour at the first stage of the feminist movement to get quick attention and today we no longer require it. The other side pointing out that history is not monolithic and there are multiple histories and today at many places we still require some kind of active radical feminism to change things.

What do you say?

A Brand New Chapter in the History of Local Trains in Mumbai!

I recently travelled in the brand new coaches of our local trains in mumbai.cushions! steel frames!stylish! and Kool! I could finally see smiles on the faces of fellow passengers. nobody was worried about the pushing,squeezing and shovelling.Everyone from the corporate trainee at a Multinational firm to our dear raucous koli fisherwoman were struck with wonder at the new comfort zone.Everyone was experiencing a proud moment thinking of "amchi mumbai". ;-)

Thrissur Pooram -
the spectacular festival
of light and colour,
percussion and elephants

Thrissur Pooram - is a cultural highlight par excellence, celebrated in the Malayalam month Medam (April/May).
The two century old festival of spectacular procession of caparisoned elephants and enthralling percussion performances in a never ending succession is an 36 hours marathon event of incredible beauty, a feast for the eye and the ear, unfolding between 6 am to 12 noon the other day.
Different from the usual temple festival, Thrissur Pooram is participated and conducted by people across all barriers of religion and caste.

http://www.mykerala.net/thrissur/pooram.html

The event mumbaiites wait for so eagerly. It is the time to give , to do something for the greater good, to make time to think beyond - to run for a cause!

White Teeth is full echoes of other texts, authors and dramatists like Shakespeare, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Salman Rushdie, Euripides, Rabindranath Tagore, E M.Forster, Robert Burns, J.D.Salinger, James Baldwin, Sophocles, etc, and singers like Bob Marley, Freddie Mercury, and Herman Hupfled, philosophers like Sartre, Nietzsche, films like Taxi Driver, Godfather, Rambo and biblical texts like Quran, Bible etc. It is characterized by ‘eclecticism’ which postmodern critic Jean-Francis Lyotard identifies as “the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong”(Ex.1,L.103 )Her characters are not only ‘always already’ embedded in their ‘unique’ contexts but are also sites of evolving new subjectivities similar to what structuralist critic Claude Levi-Strauss characterizes “as the place where something is going on”(qtd in Chandler,Ex.1.L.72). In mapping such emerging identities, Zadie Smith, a London based Anglo-Jamaican writer, falls direct in line of succession of postcolonial immigrant writers like Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monika Ali, Caryl Phillips, etc. especially in using ‘extradiegetic’ references.................



‘Multiculturalism’ as a concept is comparatively a new approach in defining the coexistence of various ‘ethnic’ communities. As Dohra Ahmed has pointed out in her review of White Teeth, the concept has been much exploited in the Liberal politics of the new ‘Cool Britannia’ slogan of the 1990s and the capitalists venture to turn “the new ‘hybrid’ nation into a product for global consumption”(Ex. ,L .6). At the same time the term seems to be a paradox in itself for it assumes a fixed preconceived notion of the existence of ‘pure’ and homogenized cultures. The capitalists venture has inadvertently overlooked the ‘difference’ within the notion of ‘ethnicity’. Zadie Smith in this novel has tried to bring out precisely the very conflict of identities that exists ‘in-between’ the domains of difference. Her work reflects the “new politics of difference and diversity” that Stuart Hall explains in his essay ‘New Ethnicities’ (259). It brings out a new version of Dickens’s London by extending the boundaries of ‘Englishness’ to include the emerging new ‘Hyphenated selves’. It reiterates what Homi Bhabha asserts in the introduction to his major book Location of Culture, “The western metro pole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of post war migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity”( 6). In White Teeth, Smith has tried to give voice to conflict between the first and subsequent generations of immigrants in trying to find a middle path between the urge to be recognized and the desire to ‘merge’ with others....


Interesting novel...give it a try!!!