Leave it to Sourav Ganguly to go out in a perplexing blaze of nothingness, with a first-ball duck at Nagpur, just as he entered with a perplexing blaze of brilliance, with an opening-innings century at Lords nearly a dozen years ago. Always a bit of drama with Sourav. Okay, more than a bit.
Diwali, the festival of light, is the biggest holiday of the year in a country that loves its holidays. Technically, it has Hindu roots — marking the homecoming of Ram after kicking some Sri Lankan booty — and is celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains in variations on a theme of the triumph of good over evil. Practically speaking, it is as secularized as Christmas in America — a disappointing trend in both cases (but that’s another story).
It is not only celebrated widely, but poorly as well.
Women are such hypocrites.
They claim a special talent in understanding the rhythms of nature – as though their “divine feminine” and Earth Motherly roots give them special access to the concepts of seasonality and ripeness. In some ways, they are extremely attuned. Many women, for example, are acutely well-prepared to demand a degree of carte blanche, forbearance, and pre-approved forgiveness every 28 days or so. In other important ways, however, they are willful and pigheaded in their rejection of the most basic notions of gestation and timeliness.
In India, state and local governments enjoy a time-honored system of balancing their financial books with easily available no-interest loans. Among the other favorable terms are indefinite payback periods, unlimited credit lines, and year-round availability. As you might expect, such easy credit is a godsend to financially strapped governments; and those which favor this bailout vehicle use it with annual regularity.
This arrangement is not, of course, particularly remunerative for the lender, First Bank of India. But then, First Bank of India doesn’t have the same political clout that most other financial institutions enjoy.
Midnight, Rue Bellecombe, Pondicherry.
The monsoon, which has been threatening to commence for several days, finally let loose tonight with a drenching thunderstorm. Let the wild rumpus begin!
For two decades, the Government of Pondicherry has watched as the town’s beautiful sand beach disappeared and fishing villages fell into the sea. Not until Beach Road, the town’s famous promenade, began subsiding did the government take action — and, naturally, it took the wrong action.
Rather than breaking the harbour which is causing the erosion, the governement began an expensive and futile program of “fortifying” the shoreline with heavy boulders. This battle cannot be won with rocks. The erosive force of the sea can only be passified by the restoration of the sandy beach, the crucial buffer between sea and land.
Continue reading ‘The Story of Pondicherry’s Eroding Coastline in a Single Image’
When reading a wonderfully crafted story, we are sometimes tempted to say that the line between prose and poetry has been blurred. We don’t really mean it, of course. It is simply our hyperbolic way of acknowledging the writer’s stylistic gifts. We cannot read Michael Ondaajte, for example, without marveling at the precision and emotional fullness of his writing; but our brains do not really struggle to ascertain whether we are in the midst of his fiction or his poems. The confidence we bring to the distinction belies its arbitrariness – at least since poetry was liberated from its formal constraints at the opening of the twentieth century – but we are usually confident nonetheless.
This sure ground frequently falls away under the magical pen of Kuzhali Manickavel, whose new work of nearly intertwined short… ummm… pieces, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, has just been published by Blaft Publications in Chennai.
Kuzhali’s stories are like well-remembered dreams. They are frustratingly elliptical and playfully topsy-turvey in their abandonment of mundane reality, yet sufficiently vivid and subtle to provide that delicious moment of doubt about the dreaming/waking, imaginary/reportorial dichotomies which make us feel in control of our lives.
Continue reading ‘Kuzhali Manickavel Is Just Like You and Me Except that Her Words Have Wings’
Pondicherry Citizens Action Network (PondyCAN!) has a rather ambitious agenda: to effectuate long-range, integrated regional master planning which will preserve, restore, and enhance this once-beautiful, rapidly despoiled, utterly unique heritage town and its surrounding natural resources, and place them within a small-radius network of symbiotic economic hubs.
Some of our endeavors are far more modest, however. One recent effort involved dissuading the Pondicherry Municipality from constructing a massive concrete market block at the top of the central canal which divides the French and Tamil districts of the historic Boulevard Town.
Recent Comments