Thoughts on Rushdie's STC

The first time I tried reading Salman Rushdie, I was still in school and I couldn’t get past the first few pages. The book was ‘Midnight’s Children’. I just finished my second attempt, and I’m glad to say I made it through the entire book. This time it was ‘Shalimar the Clown’, and though the first few pages were not as engaging as I would have liked it to be, by the time I reached the middle, I was engrossed.

Writing novels is truly an art – in my opinion, if it does not have a generous dose of creativity, you might as well be reading the paper - and Rushdie moves between modern politics and history with the ease and gracefulness of a tiger hunting its prey in the open fields of Africa. He lays bare the basic human emotions of love and hatred with words that are so lyrical and evocative, you can visualize them as he writes. I especially liked that his characters are well-etched – though each character has shades of grey, clearly, the sympathy of the reader is meant for one person only – Shalimar the Clown – and that person does get it. That is another rather difficult goal to achieve when you set about writing a novel, I would imagine. If your characters are not well fleshed-out, you lose track somewhere along the way and then the end is never exactly what you imagined it would be. Some would call that part of the beauty of writing as well. Perhaps, but I feel that though the writer is free to express himself however he or she wants, in a story, you have to be clear about your characters – you have to convey your thoughts in a way that the reader is not left wondering about the direction you are trying to take him or her in. Many writers make that mistake, but Rushdie did not get caught in that trap in 'Shalimar The Clown'.

I don’t want this to be a book report, so I’m not elaborating on the storyline (I don’t like the people who give out the ending of the movie or book before you’ve had a chance to watch or read it yourself!!), but it should suffice to say that with names as interesting as Shalimar, Kashmira, Boonyi and Maximilian, the story lived up to its characters. A story with a Mary or John could be boring, after all, but with names like these? He didn’t have a choice!

Education and literacy

They were all silent, even those who had not committed the sins I had attributed to them. I dismissed the class early, although the culprits and a few others stayed back to plead their case. They were docile even in their pleas: they wanted to be forgiven, they did not know any better, this was what most professors expected. Two were in tears. What could they do? They had never learned any better. From the first day they had set foot in elementary school, they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing. - Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi How does it feel when you have ideas and thoughts simmering inside you, but you never have the encouragement or the platform to give vent to them? I know what it feels like. In school, when I was mesmerized by the beauty of billowing clouds on a sun-drenched day, or the romance of the pearl-grey sky throwing forth pricks of happy moisture on a hot evening, I often felt privileged and lonely at the same time. Privileged because as anyone with the ‘heart of a poet’ will understand (as years later a friend from college put it), those fleeting moments when Nature is at her resplendent best are genuinely special, and lonely because at the time, poetry to most in my school meant unwelcome lines that you had to mug up to get extra marks in exams. We were never asked to comment on anything, argue or even paraphrase. It went to the extent that Maths – MATHS for heaven’s sake – was sometime learnt by rote. Today when my 16-year-old cousin tells me that mugging is the only way to get marks in exams – and marks are ultimately the deciding factor for admission to college – I start off arguing forcefully about the need for him to actually understand what he is learning, but slowly my energy peters out. Because he is right. I went through the rigmarole of Indian education and he is still at it, years later, and nothing has changed. I have nothing to support my point of view, apart from my passion for what I call ‘real’ education, as opposed to ‘engineered’ literacy. The Indian education system – and by that I mean primarily Indian state examination boards, because I don’t have the experience of anything else – are seriously flawed. I certainly don’t remember very much of what I studied in school, and I was a pretty good student all through. What is the point of this education then? It doesn’t teach confidence or encourage innovation or talent. It creates factory-moulded robots – and when you hear about the saffronisation of education, that is even scarier. George Orwell’s ‘1984’, anyone? Today the stress placed on students during exams leads them to take their lives, and nowadays parents are turning to that as a solution to their wards’ problems as well. Arjun Singh’s HRD Ministry convened a meeting with representatives from the IIM’s, IIT’s, NGO’s and other institutes last week in New Delhi to debate the issue. Lots of solutions are being bandied about – from doing away with exams till Class 8, to introducing a grading system. Whether mere discussions will translate into effective action remains to be seen, but till then ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’ could be written by Mark Twain for all anyone cared. And years down the lane, another person like me will feel forcefully angry and hopelessly sad at the same time, for growing years having gone un-nurtured.

Excerpts from 'Eleven Minutes'

I can choose to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life. _______ All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that’s a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly. And the person who loves wholeheartedly feels free. ….in love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. - Eleven Minutes, Paulo Coelho