if the Vietnam War memorial in DC is an atonement, why is it dedicated to soldiers and not to the civilians killed?
in this highly militaristic country, a self-proclaimed-authority of a woman dares to say that Yemen is militaristic because it has an unfavorable sex ratio, that testosterone unchecked does exactly that. and that India, Pak, China and the rest can be talked about in a similar fashion.
i guess such American women cheer their men to righteous war
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
i think i've become a little insufferable. i don't easily trust anyone to do something better than me. especially when its in contradiction to my work.
the first step to the cure is the diagnosis...
and while it lasts, i hope i can turn it to positive productivity...
are those who are vain also those who are uncomfortable when praised?
the first step to the cure is the diagnosis...
and while it lasts, i hope i can turn it to positive productivity...
are those who are vain also those who are uncomfortable when praised?
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Book Review 2
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
This National Book Award winner is a very old book, written in 1938 and first published in 1939; and is yet very relevant today. In fact more so today because reading it brings the realization, that wars have been raging in this world ever so often since this book was written. And one wonders when and where Trumbo’s anti-war message got lost in this world. For people my generation especially, who have never really witnessed a pacifist movement, this book forces one to think, to question the need for any war, no matter what purpose.
Before I begin on a critique of the book, it is important to place its importance in history. Notice the year in which the book was written. It seems to be an output of the revulsion of war that spread through the world after the World War I. And it was published two days after the second World War began. It was an immediate success on its publication but suddenly died out after Pearl Harbor happened and the need for anti-war sentiment was dispensed with, in the contagious nationalism and righteousness that increased the United States’ aggressiveness in WW-II. It is not just a popular myth that those of us born after the two World Wars see this world differently from what people who lived in Dalton’s age must have. For them the first WW must have come as a shocking realization of the havoc that war could cause; of the reach and effect that a war could have, of the numbers it could kill, and kill so easily with the invention of modern warfare. And yet the extreme violence and brutality perpetrated by the Nazis, and the vehemence with which the Allied powers (and their supporters) felt the need to act, strongly justified the second WW and temporarily erased the logic of pacifism. Much later the book became popular again during the Vietnam anti-war sentiment that spread through the United States.
The book begins as a semi-dream and it takes quite a bit of time on the reader’s part to figure out whether it really is a dream or whether it is subconscious rambling or what. Written throughout in the voice of a second-person narrative; the entire book moves as conversations, memories and thoughts inside one person’s mind. Joe Bonham wakes up from some reverie to the ringing of a telephone somewhere and to the realization of pain. His thoughts are confused to the point where there is a conscious knowledge of again being in the recurring memory of the day he had heard about the death of his father, when he used to work in the bakery. The phone may not actually be ringing at all. And yet it is ringing in his mind and he cannot get it to stop nor can he for some reason get to it.
The first thing that Trumbo’s character realizes about his physical condition is that he is wrapped in bandage, every part of him. And soon after he realizes that he is deaf. The way Trumbo introduces Joe’s physical state to the reader in such little bits through Joe’s own realization is both clever and riveting. The narration of Joe’s thoughts, on his realization of being deaf; have two important achievements. The first is that Trumbo gets his first opportunity to express scorn for the war. The words “Where did they get that stuff about bombproof dugouts when a man in one of them could be hit so hard that the whole complicated business of his ears could be blown away leaving him deaf so deaf that he couldn’t hear his own heartbeat” and “So he’d never hear again. Well there were a hell of a lot of things he didn’t want to hear again. He never wanted to hear the biting little castanet sound of a machine gun or the high whistle of a .75 coming down fast or the slow thunder as it hit or the whine of airplane overhead or the yells of a guy trying to explain to somebody that he’s got a bullet in his belly and that his breakfast is coming out through the front of him and why won’t somebody stop going forward and give him a hand only nobody can hear him they’re so scared themselves” are very powerful and full of sarcasm against war. The second achievement is that his deafness is the first bit to the piecemeal construction of Joe’s medical state, and at this point in the book it is the only known condition, to which Joe’s reaction conveys a sense of tragedy combined with gratitude. His thoughts are narrated as “What about the rest of the guys? Maybe they didn’t come out so lucky. … It isn’t anything to kick up your heels and dance about but it might be worse. Only when you’re deaf you’re lonesome. You’re godforsaken.” Both the gratitude that Joe feels at being only deaf (his realization so far) and the tragedy he feels he has been a victim to, are set by Trumbo in contrasting anticipation for what he will actually spring upon his audience. And when that unravels slowly, the reader tends to remember these thoughts of Joe when he was only deaf. The gratitude turns to anger and the tragedy is ever so heightened.
A strange suspense runs throughout the book, as if Trumbo wants to keep the reader guessing about what could come next. Initially this is more of an expectation by the reader, eager to form the skeleton of the story that the author has in mind. Once this is done and the horror of the tragedy to which Joe has been victim has been communicated to the reader, the suspense takes on a hopeless view for a while. The realization sinks in that Joe is a living thing only in the technical sense but there’s nothing left to his life that could keep the story going. A human condition so extreme was beyond imagination because one does not normally imagine the level of injury that Joe has been through to be possible without causing death. Trumbo suddenly then twists the narrative with the fact that Joe has an intelligent thinking mind that can do a lot even though it has almost lost its body. An excitement grips Joe and along with him grips the reader as well. Then the suspense takes a more urgent note as the reader waits with bated breath for Joe to overcome his tragedy and to move on in some way, a hope that the reader thought was incapable of existing in the slightest.
There is a blurring of lines between dreams, memories, sleep and wakefulness carried along with the book as it advances. In fact this is probably the one quality of the narration that transports the reader into the bodily world of Joe Bonham. It is because of this that one experiences the possible state of being alive with a physical existence that falls short of being called a human body. Trumbo effectively uses this to involve the reader and to arouse in her the vehemence and the anger that he felt against war.
Joe’s vivid memories of his life before the war tells one of a normal happy childhood with parents in love with each other, his times spent with his father, and normal troubles of a young adolescence. There is a hint in the story of Joe’s family as never having enough money, and yet even this difficulty is to an extent washed down with the description of all that home-made/grown healthy food. Trumbo couldn’t have conjured up a more perfect contrast to Joe’s present state of being, to enhance the horror and to leave not a trace of doubt in favor of the idea of war and martyrdom for some larger ideology. More than once in the book, Trumbo’s disgust for ideological war shows through; in Joe’s conversations with himself, on his wasted life for someone else’s cause: “Maybe there are more things wrong with you than you suspect Joe. Oh why the hell did you get into this mess anyhow? Because it wasn’t your fight Joe. You never really knew what the fight was all about.” At one more point in the book Joe is talking to himself about liberty, democracy, honor, native-land, and all those ideas that they make people fight for and his simple sensible questions like “What kind of democracy? And whose?” and “Tell us how much better a decent dead man feels than an indecent live one?” send Trumbo’s anti-war message across very effectively.
Then there is the memory of Joe’s girl, the tenderness and freshness of finding love at an early age. It seems like a precious love, one that must be treasured. And yet again Trumbo is very clever in his narration because he does not let the two young people be with each other for too long. They seemed to have just found each other when war takes him away, and Joe’s tragedy erases every possibility of them ever getting back together. Trumbo builds up the scorn and anger against war with all these details. It becomes criminal for any war to destroy a life such as Joe Bonham’s and reduce it to its present state. And in his narration, he keeps Joe going on with the memory of Kareen. It’s the strength and consistency of love against the destruction of war.
I don’t know if there has ever really been a medical case like that of Joe described in this book. I remember the shock I felt when finally Joe realizes how very little is left of his body. Even if a person in such a state got rid of all pain, one would think there was nothing left in life for him. In fact, the first thought that probably came to my mind was that this was a perfect case for euthanasia. Death is the first hope even for Joe Bonham, when the enormity of his tragedy registers with him. This is what he thinks: “Oh no. No no no. He couldn’t live like this because he would go crazy. But he couldn’t die because he couldn’t kill himself. If he could only breathe he could die. That was funny but it was true. He could hold his breath and kill himself. That was the only way left. Except that he wasn’t breathing. His lungs were pumping air but he couldn’t stop them from doing it. He couldn’t live and he couldn’t die.” The entire thing seemed almost fantastic and unreal to me, and yet not once did I doubt the convincing story.
There is one bit in the story that was to me the most horrifying and nerve-wrenching part. This is when Joe feels a rat chewing on him and there is nothing he can do to get it off him or to call for help. Later he thinks it may have been a dream and because his being awake and sleeping is so much a matter of what he believes he is doing, there is no way to verify the reality of the incident. At this point I almost lost my head along with Joe, and was really frightened that whether dream or not, this could recur; and if it did that would drive him insane. Simply reading about it and envisioning it was like some outrageous nightmare come alive. Thankfully, Trumbo does not do a repeat of it. He does use the rat to remind Joe of a slightly gross war incident when they stumble upon a dead Prussian captain in an abandoned trench. The position in which the body is found suggested that the Prussian had been heading into the dugout exactly when he was shot. He had one leg up in the air and the body was swollen, being dead, although the mustache was still waxed. And they find sitting on his neck a fat rat, chewing away at his face. One yell by someone sets them all at the rat and they don’t stop till they have beaten it to pulp. Trumbo’s words right at this moment make mechanical soldiers out of the men who had for a moment forgotten themselves : “Then they were all still for a second. They felt kind of foolish. They left the dugout and went on with the war.”
There is another war memory of Joe’s which has a certain black humor to it. It’s the narrative of the lone Bavarian who had probably wondered beyond what he had intended to, is shot at, and remains dead and ignored caught on a wire till he attracts orders of burial by his strong decay stink. And then is blown back from his grave by a mine to land on the wire again to decay further. This earned him the nickname of Lazarus. I kept wondering if Trumbo had been in some war or not, because one would think only a real experience would enable him to describe decaying human bodies with such ease of narration. But apparently Trumbo hadn’t been part of any war. In fact Wikipedia tells me that Johnny Got His Gun was inspired by an article Trumbo had read about a Canadian soldier who had lost all his limbs in WW-I and was visited in hospital by the Prince of Wales. This inspiration is directly depicted in one scene in the book when Joe gets some visitors and he realizes that they have come to honor him with a medal. His anger knows no bounds at this outrage and he expresses it in the only way that he can by rolling from shoulder to shoulder and puffing out air and in this hysteria he manages to create his first grunting sound vibrations.
Joe Bonham in the book is an intelligent person. He is curious about what state he is in, and he answers his questions himself. He reasons with himself and lists for himself everything in life that he will never again know, feel or experience. The most fascinating bit in the book is his fight to control his life again in whatever manner is possible. In fact, Trumbo separates this part of the book by calling it ‘Book 2: The Living’ as compared with the first half which is ‘Book 1: The Dead’. Joe begins with tracking time, at first counting to himself so he can keep an account of time and later more intelligently by sensing the sunrise and keeping a check on his perception of time with the visits of the nurse and his schedule of change of clothes and linen. It is amazing to read about such a brave and intelligent attitude. And then the whole idea of being able to communicate despite being just a chunk of flesh was superb. When the nurse writes ‘Merry Christmas’ on his chest, as a reader one feels like celebrating a fresh new birth of his contact with the world. Despite being a depressing story Trumbo manages to blend so much life and hope into it; although he does end the book again at a very morbid note. And the last Morse code speech that Joe communicates across with his demand to have him shown all over the world so people know what war can do, is the strongest anti-war speech I have seen or heard.
It’s a brilliantly and passionately written book. There was also a movie based on it and it did make some substantial changes even though Trumbo apparently wrote the screenplay and directed the movie too. In the movie, when finally Joe manages to communicate with the Morse code, what he asks is to be killed. I personally preferred how the book treated the story, made it less dramatic and yet more unexpected and finished off at an unknown point where Joe probably lives on, even though all hope and all life within him is killed with a refusal by the people around him to acknowledge his amazing success at communication and to set him free, and most importantly in his own words because they did not “want him”.
This National Book Award winner is a very old book, written in 1938 and first published in 1939; and is yet very relevant today. In fact more so today because reading it brings the realization, that wars have been raging in this world ever so often since this book was written. And one wonders when and where Trumbo’s anti-war message got lost in this world. For people my generation especially, who have never really witnessed a pacifist movement, this book forces one to think, to question the need for any war, no matter what purpose.
Before I begin on a critique of the book, it is important to place its importance in history. Notice the year in which the book was written. It seems to be an output of the revulsion of war that spread through the world after the World War I. And it was published two days after the second World War began. It was an immediate success on its publication but suddenly died out after Pearl Harbor happened and the need for anti-war sentiment was dispensed with, in the contagious nationalism and righteousness that increased the United States’ aggressiveness in WW-II. It is not just a popular myth that those of us born after the two World Wars see this world differently from what people who lived in Dalton’s age must have. For them the first WW must have come as a shocking realization of the havoc that war could cause; of the reach and effect that a war could have, of the numbers it could kill, and kill so easily with the invention of modern warfare. And yet the extreme violence and brutality perpetrated by the Nazis, and the vehemence with which the Allied powers (and their supporters) felt the need to act, strongly justified the second WW and temporarily erased the logic of pacifism. Much later the book became popular again during the Vietnam anti-war sentiment that spread through the United States.
The book begins as a semi-dream and it takes quite a bit of time on the reader’s part to figure out whether it really is a dream or whether it is subconscious rambling or what. Written throughout in the voice of a second-person narrative; the entire book moves as conversations, memories and thoughts inside one person’s mind. Joe Bonham wakes up from some reverie to the ringing of a telephone somewhere and to the realization of pain. His thoughts are confused to the point where there is a conscious knowledge of again being in the recurring memory of the day he had heard about the death of his father, when he used to work in the bakery. The phone may not actually be ringing at all. And yet it is ringing in his mind and he cannot get it to stop nor can he for some reason get to it.
The first thing that Trumbo’s character realizes about his physical condition is that he is wrapped in bandage, every part of him. And soon after he realizes that he is deaf. The way Trumbo introduces Joe’s physical state to the reader in such little bits through Joe’s own realization is both clever and riveting. The narration of Joe’s thoughts, on his realization of being deaf; have two important achievements. The first is that Trumbo gets his first opportunity to express scorn for the war. The words “Where did they get that stuff about bombproof dugouts when a man in one of them could be hit so hard that the whole complicated business of his ears could be blown away leaving him deaf so deaf that he couldn’t hear his own heartbeat” and “So he’d never hear again. Well there were a hell of a lot of things he didn’t want to hear again. He never wanted to hear the biting little castanet sound of a machine gun or the high whistle of a .75 coming down fast or the slow thunder as it hit or the whine of airplane overhead or the yells of a guy trying to explain to somebody that he’s got a bullet in his belly and that his breakfast is coming out through the front of him and why won’t somebody stop going forward and give him a hand only nobody can hear him they’re so scared themselves” are very powerful and full of sarcasm against war. The second achievement is that his deafness is the first bit to the piecemeal construction of Joe’s medical state, and at this point in the book it is the only known condition, to which Joe’s reaction conveys a sense of tragedy combined with gratitude. His thoughts are narrated as “What about the rest of the guys? Maybe they didn’t come out so lucky. … It isn’t anything to kick up your heels and dance about but it might be worse. Only when you’re deaf you’re lonesome. You’re godforsaken.” Both the gratitude that Joe feels at being only deaf (his realization so far) and the tragedy he feels he has been a victim to, are set by Trumbo in contrasting anticipation for what he will actually spring upon his audience. And when that unravels slowly, the reader tends to remember these thoughts of Joe when he was only deaf. The gratitude turns to anger and the tragedy is ever so heightened.
A strange suspense runs throughout the book, as if Trumbo wants to keep the reader guessing about what could come next. Initially this is more of an expectation by the reader, eager to form the skeleton of the story that the author has in mind. Once this is done and the horror of the tragedy to which Joe has been victim has been communicated to the reader, the suspense takes on a hopeless view for a while. The realization sinks in that Joe is a living thing only in the technical sense but there’s nothing left to his life that could keep the story going. A human condition so extreme was beyond imagination because one does not normally imagine the level of injury that Joe has been through to be possible without causing death. Trumbo suddenly then twists the narrative with the fact that Joe has an intelligent thinking mind that can do a lot even though it has almost lost its body. An excitement grips Joe and along with him grips the reader as well. Then the suspense takes a more urgent note as the reader waits with bated breath for Joe to overcome his tragedy and to move on in some way, a hope that the reader thought was incapable of existing in the slightest.
There is a blurring of lines between dreams, memories, sleep and wakefulness carried along with the book as it advances. In fact this is probably the one quality of the narration that transports the reader into the bodily world of Joe Bonham. It is because of this that one experiences the possible state of being alive with a physical existence that falls short of being called a human body. Trumbo effectively uses this to involve the reader and to arouse in her the vehemence and the anger that he felt against war.
Joe’s vivid memories of his life before the war tells one of a normal happy childhood with parents in love with each other, his times spent with his father, and normal troubles of a young adolescence. There is a hint in the story of Joe’s family as never having enough money, and yet even this difficulty is to an extent washed down with the description of all that home-made/grown healthy food. Trumbo couldn’t have conjured up a more perfect contrast to Joe’s present state of being, to enhance the horror and to leave not a trace of doubt in favor of the idea of war and martyrdom for some larger ideology. More than once in the book, Trumbo’s disgust for ideological war shows through; in Joe’s conversations with himself, on his wasted life for someone else’s cause: “Maybe there are more things wrong with you than you suspect Joe. Oh why the hell did you get into this mess anyhow? Because it wasn’t your fight Joe. You never really knew what the fight was all about.” At one more point in the book Joe is talking to himself about liberty, democracy, honor, native-land, and all those ideas that they make people fight for and his simple sensible questions like “What kind of democracy? And whose?” and “Tell us how much better a decent dead man feels than an indecent live one?” send Trumbo’s anti-war message across very effectively.
Then there is the memory of Joe’s girl, the tenderness and freshness of finding love at an early age. It seems like a precious love, one that must be treasured. And yet again Trumbo is very clever in his narration because he does not let the two young people be with each other for too long. They seemed to have just found each other when war takes him away, and Joe’s tragedy erases every possibility of them ever getting back together. Trumbo builds up the scorn and anger against war with all these details. It becomes criminal for any war to destroy a life such as Joe Bonham’s and reduce it to its present state. And in his narration, he keeps Joe going on with the memory of Kareen. It’s the strength and consistency of love against the destruction of war.
I don’t know if there has ever really been a medical case like that of Joe described in this book. I remember the shock I felt when finally Joe realizes how very little is left of his body. Even if a person in such a state got rid of all pain, one would think there was nothing left in life for him. In fact, the first thought that probably came to my mind was that this was a perfect case for euthanasia. Death is the first hope even for Joe Bonham, when the enormity of his tragedy registers with him. This is what he thinks: “Oh no. No no no. He couldn’t live like this because he would go crazy. But he couldn’t die because he couldn’t kill himself. If he could only breathe he could die. That was funny but it was true. He could hold his breath and kill himself. That was the only way left. Except that he wasn’t breathing. His lungs were pumping air but he couldn’t stop them from doing it. He couldn’t live and he couldn’t die.” The entire thing seemed almost fantastic and unreal to me, and yet not once did I doubt the convincing story.
There is one bit in the story that was to me the most horrifying and nerve-wrenching part. This is when Joe feels a rat chewing on him and there is nothing he can do to get it off him or to call for help. Later he thinks it may have been a dream and because his being awake and sleeping is so much a matter of what he believes he is doing, there is no way to verify the reality of the incident. At this point I almost lost my head along with Joe, and was really frightened that whether dream or not, this could recur; and if it did that would drive him insane. Simply reading about it and envisioning it was like some outrageous nightmare come alive. Thankfully, Trumbo does not do a repeat of it. He does use the rat to remind Joe of a slightly gross war incident when they stumble upon a dead Prussian captain in an abandoned trench. The position in which the body is found suggested that the Prussian had been heading into the dugout exactly when he was shot. He had one leg up in the air and the body was swollen, being dead, although the mustache was still waxed. And they find sitting on his neck a fat rat, chewing away at his face. One yell by someone sets them all at the rat and they don’t stop till they have beaten it to pulp. Trumbo’s words right at this moment make mechanical soldiers out of the men who had for a moment forgotten themselves : “Then they were all still for a second. They felt kind of foolish. They left the dugout and went on with the war.”
There is another war memory of Joe’s which has a certain black humor to it. It’s the narrative of the lone Bavarian who had probably wondered beyond what he had intended to, is shot at, and remains dead and ignored caught on a wire till he attracts orders of burial by his strong decay stink. And then is blown back from his grave by a mine to land on the wire again to decay further. This earned him the nickname of Lazarus. I kept wondering if Trumbo had been in some war or not, because one would think only a real experience would enable him to describe decaying human bodies with such ease of narration. But apparently Trumbo hadn’t been part of any war. In fact Wikipedia tells me that Johnny Got His Gun was inspired by an article Trumbo had read about a Canadian soldier who had lost all his limbs in WW-I and was visited in hospital by the Prince of Wales. This inspiration is directly depicted in one scene in the book when Joe gets some visitors and he realizes that they have come to honor him with a medal. His anger knows no bounds at this outrage and he expresses it in the only way that he can by rolling from shoulder to shoulder and puffing out air and in this hysteria he manages to create his first grunting sound vibrations.
Joe Bonham in the book is an intelligent person. He is curious about what state he is in, and he answers his questions himself. He reasons with himself and lists for himself everything in life that he will never again know, feel or experience. The most fascinating bit in the book is his fight to control his life again in whatever manner is possible. In fact, Trumbo separates this part of the book by calling it ‘Book 2: The Living’ as compared with the first half which is ‘Book 1: The Dead’. Joe begins with tracking time, at first counting to himself so he can keep an account of time and later more intelligently by sensing the sunrise and keeping a check on his perception of time with the visits of the nurse and his schedule of change of clothes and linen. It is amazing to read about such a brave and intelligent attitude. And then the whole idea of being able to communicate despite being just a chunk of flesh was superb. When the nurse writes ‘Merry Christmas’ on his chest, as a reader one feels like celebrating a fresh new birth of his contact with the world. Despite being a depressing story Trumbo manages to blend so much life and hope into it; although he does end the book again at a very morbid note. And the last Morse code speech that Joe communicates across with his demand to have him shown all over the world so people know what war can do, is the strongest anti-war speech I have seen or heard.
It’s a brilliantly and passionately written book. There was also a movie based on it and it did make some substantial changes even though Trumbo apparently wrote the screenplay and directed the movie too. In the movie, when finally Joe manages to communicate with the Morse code, what he asks is to be killed. I personally preferred how the book treated the story, made it less dramatic and yet more unexpected and finished off at an unknown point where Joe probably lives on, even though all hope and all life within him is killed with a refusal by the people around him to acknowledge his amazing success at communication and to set him free, and most importantly in his own words because they did not “want him”.
Book Review 1
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
I did not think this book was strictly a war memoir but I may be wrong in that, as I cannot claim to have read more than one or two war memoirs before this. However, a war memoir according to me would be a private narration strictly in the words of a soldier. And Orwell in this book does not appear a strict soldier throughout. Nor is his narration as private. He is more of an analyst of the war; at least more so as the book progresses.
The beginning of the book is almost childlike in its enthusiasm for the revolution and for the fight against Franco the Fascist general-dictator. At more than one instance, Orwell talks about the war as if it were an ideological decision. To fight in favor of what he thought was undoubtedly the right, against the wrong; to fight for the rights of man – democracy, liberty and equality. The very first page of the book describes the strong impression an Italian militiaman had on Orwell. In describing this man Orwell makes him larger than life and talks about how this vision of one man signifies to him the “special atmosphere of the time”. He talks of the man as one who could kill for a friend, who had the “pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors”. Orwell at the same time admits that he knew that the only way to preserve this impression was to never see the man again. Reading between the lines Orwell seems to me to be saying that he felt the romance and the idealism of the war that that one man represented for him at the moment, and also knew that the very emotions that he stood for, or that special moment itself, were fragile and could not be relived again. Once in the book Orwell credits the idealism to the inherent values of the Spaniards; to their cultural generosity and humaneness. His words “something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution” express his awe, admiration and strange tragic pity for the Spaniards all at once. It is almost as if he were saying that the Spaniards are too good to be living in this world and feeling sorry for them for the same reason.
Orwell’s description of the society in Catalonia as he sees it for the first time is very important especially because later the book contrasts this description with the changes that are obvious in just a few months. In December 1936, Orwell saw the revolution is full swing. The Anarchists were in control, industries had been collectivized, tipping was prohibited, there were no private cars, revolutionary posters could be seen all over the place, etc. He talks about there being no unemployment and no beggars, yet poverty and a severe food shortage, especially that of bread. And at the same time, bread was being wasted in the militia camps. Repeatedly the filth and chaos, and the unpreparedness and inefficiencies of the militia are mentioned. These little details represent the situation as one that was not stable, was inevitable to collapse. He implies this in retrospect especially, when he says that he overlooked to observe that many individuals could then have been impersonating as revolutionaries simply to save their skin, and the situation was not therefore as equal and liberated as it felt it was.
And yet Orwell says that what he experienced then was as close to a pure idea of equality that humans can achieve. Especially at the front, where all soldiers were equal and there were no rank or pay differences. At one point in the book, he talks about how it wasn’t as difficult to get people to obey orders even without the fear of superiors, as it may seem. And he explains how – in fact in the workers’ army discipline is a voluntary concept based on the consciousness of the need to obey, compared with that in a bourgeois army where discipline is simply based on fear. He himself uses the word “theoretically” to describe such voluntariness and one would think that such theory would be impossible to achieve in a large mass of people like a force or an army. But he surprises the reader by telling us that it did work though it took some time to get everyone to believe in it. I would however, still doubt that it could work everywhere. I rather think it needed the combination of the prevailing ‘atmosphere’ then and the inherent goodness (according to Orwell) of the Spaniards to achieve it. But that is a matter of pure opinion, and nevertheless I regard Orwell as having been lucky to have experienced such utopia.
The description of the actual war in the book, that is the days when Orwell spends at the front, reveals, as he admits, the non-war-like nature of it. Throughout the book he uses words like pantomime, racket etc. to describe the war. Add to that, the lack of weapons, fighting and battle. It is quite comic when on the front he states that most casualties were because of their own substandard weapons. Actually the dry humor comes up quite often in the days spent on the front; say for example, when Orwell says his life was saved more than once because of the marksmanship of the Spaniards. Moreover, in Orwell’s words, “the real weapon was not the rifle but the megaphone”. The whole concept of fighting by shouting at the enemy to have him convert over to your side sounded hilarious to me and so must it have to Orwell, and yet he says it was sometimes effective. Moreover, his words “deserters are actually more useful to you than corpses” brings home the logic behind it. The sad thing is that much of this kind of logic is seen to be missing from collective human minds in times of war. Most of the war described by him is defensive in nature, both at the front and during the street fighting.
The book also in a way gives an outsider’s opinion of some cultural aspects of the Spaniards. Orwell talks of them as being embarrassingly generous, chaotic, undisciplined, lacking the skills for warfare; and more so, lacking the intention to maximize their advantages in war. The humor is even more effective because as a reader one realizes that it is not his intention to sound funny, but simply that the situation was so ridiculous and laughable. According to him the very few weapons that they had were also not handed out such that the best men would have the best guns. Moreover, the few days when they receive some training before being dispatched to the front, is more an exercise in marching and not a single man is taught how to fire rifles or how to throw hand-grenades. He describes many young boys enlisting as “children” and talks of their excitement as being almost boy-scoutish. I often got the feeling that the whole thing was a matter of play for many people.
The only time he talks about the glory of war is when he is describing the sight of the Italian troops belonging to the International Column being seen off by the crowds at the Tarragona station. That vision described by him is impressive. He tells of the wounded and disabled in war cheering the fresh and healthy soldiers going off to war; and says that the sight revived the feeling that “war is glorious after all”. His words in these paragraphs bring back something of the ancient wars where there used to be codes for war and warriors were known to be brave and heroic.
Because of the manner in which Orwell brings out the political hostilities of the various parties even within the anti-Fascists, one comes off with the feeling of men being used as pawns. Very few people actually fighting are aware (according to Orwell) of what is actually going on. Each person seems to have a private reason for fighting and very often Orwell says in very clear words that facts are withheld knowingly from the forces at the front; and that sometimes this is justifiable but often not.
The feeling of men being used as pawns becomes even more emphasized when he talks of a possible reason for arresting the P.O.U.M militia being, to stop the news of the repression of the P.O.U.M. party carrying onto the front, which would discourage their people from fighting. Also he repeatedly talks of individuals from the forces of these parties as different from the minds ruling the parties. He emphasizes this by repeatedly telling the reader that away from the street fighting, all these forces were friendly with each other. And even on the front, the political rivalry could not be seen amongst the forces. The difference becomes stark Orwell explains the ban and the maligning of the P.O.U.M. which led to the hunting down of P.O.U.M. men mostly by the Communist secret police. Like he says he was never accused of being a Trotskyist or a Fascist spy by any rival forces at the front. In fact, from Orwell’s narration another point that comes across is the ineffectiveness of even the government in much of the political mishap that happened after the Barcelona street fighting. Also Orwell manages to convince the reader in the apparent autonomy of the Communist secret police which implies that they were acting under foreign interests. In fact he quotes some government officials and the evidence does seem to point at the Russian role and the helplessness of the government against it. Also the important point that Orwell manages to establish is that even the government the charges against the P.O.U.M. although they could not stop the arrests.
In comparing the situation of December 1936 with that which prevailed when Orwell returned to civil society after his first stint at the front, he describes what he called “swinging it (the revolution) back” by the Communists and Liberals; something he admits he hadn’t grasped earlier on as being possible to do. He talks about the sudden change in civil society where people had lost interest in the war, class and income divisions of society were reasserting themselves, beggars had sprung up, tipping was back in practice, the Popular Army was touted as being heroic and the other militias were blamed to be undisciplined etc., luxurious expenditures were back. And there was a general expectation of ‘trouble’ in the air.
After the street fighting in Barcelona things got even worse. Now, instead of people joining the militia voluntarily, they were being conscripted; which meant that they could no longer voluntarily quit and were regarded as ‘deserters’ if they did so. There was even worse censoring of newspapers, such that censored portions were filled up with other matter. Something that made the shortage of food worse for the people, especially so for the poor, was that there was now a shortage of small change of currency. When the P.O.U.M. was banned, it suddenly became safe to act bourgeois whereas when Orwell had first come to the country brimming with revolution, the only way to be safe was to look like a worker.
The political analysis of the war is the best treasure that the book holds. It is that, and the journalistic account of what happened during the Barcelona street fighting, that makes this book a document more than just a reference for the Spanish Civil War. Like Orwell says himself, “on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan”, no account of such a war should be believed without doubt. And yet, Orwell’s arguments and analysis are difficult to be branded as outright lies, and this is more because in most of the analysis Orwell does seem to be exposing the lies in the media rather than single someone out for blame. The book is more an effort to expose the plot to frame the P.O.U.M. party rather than to frame someone else.
His arguments are more in defence rather than an attempt at accusation and that is a more decent way to argue. In fact, Orwell himself states that earlier on in the war he was more inclined to agree with the Communist version and that he also thought it was them doing the real fighting. He is honest enough to accept that although he saw the romance in the revolution, it wasn’t easy for him to believe in the feasibility of the idea. And yet his loyalties for the P.O.U.M. party become stronger once he realized its unfair victim status in the local politics. He states some very reasonable arguments against the blame put on the P.O.U.M. (that they were Fascist spies) – and even provides post mortem analysis that reveals that the accusations on the party were never proven.
Plus, Orwell tries to give the broader picture that brings the Spanish Civil War in the context of world support and interests and Russian Communism. Orwell also has made a reasonable effort to separate words like Socialism and Communism, and to explain others like Trotskyism. The most important of these that I got from this book was the earlier mysterious concept to me of how Communism could be right-winged and of the Capitalist interests in any Communist agendas. All that he says gives a reasonable reason for how the various European countries behaved while this was going on, and how as he says “the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain” because of the interests that their investments in the country had built. The revolution was not mentioned in the foreign media because the best way to stop the revolution was to not recognize its existence.
There are however, a couple of points that Orwell makes, that one is not so convinced of, as a reader. He says that there was little doubt that arms were deliberately held from them so as to keep the Anarchists and revolutionary forces from having access to them once the fighting against Franco was over. This claim of his may or may not be true, because for once he does not give any basis for such a claim, other than the suspicion of a motive and an opportunity.
I think the most important point that the book makes, is about war propaganda. Orwell says “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” This is so true almost everywhere in the world, even if those who have fought do talk to the world, it is almost always after the war is over; and hardly ever such that it can stop the exploitation of the emotion of war. The press, and the governments (foreign or local), are the ones who take control of the war and it is almost as if they maneuver it to strike upon that which benefits them most. Such a scapegoat in this war was the P.O.U.M. the one small-numbered, weak party that had no representation in any press outside of Spain, and the party that considered the war against Fascism synonymous with revolution (suppressing them was the surest way to kill the revolution).
The details about the secret jails and imprisoned people who were never tried and were denied access to even lawyers; and their secret exterminations in prison shows the covertness of the whole incident. The entire setting reminds one of Orwell’s later Nineteen Eighty Four, as it should because he wove that story around these experiences. And yet in this book Orwell says something to the effect that after Spain, his belief in humanity grew stronger.
I did not think this book was strictly a war memoir but I may be wrong in that, as I cannot claim to have read more than one or two war memoirs before this. However, a war memoir according to me would be a private narration strictly in the words of a soldier. And Orwell in this book does not appear a strict soldier throughout. Nor is his narration as private. He is more of an analyst of the war; at least more so as the book progresses.
The beginning of the book is almost childlike in its enthusiasm for the revolution and for the fight against Franco the Fascist general-dictator. At more than one instance, Orwell talks about the war as if it were an ideological decision. To fight in favor of what he thought was undoubtedly the right, against the wrong; to fight for the rights of man – democracy, liberty and equality. The very first page of the book describes the strong impression an Italian militiaman had on Orwell. In describing this man Orwell makes him larger than life and talks about how this vision of one man signifies to him the “special atmosphere of the time”. He talks of the man as one who could kill for a friend, who had the “pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors”. Orwell at the same time admits that he knew that the only way to preserve this impression was to never see the man again. Reading between the lines Orwell seems to me to be saying that he felt the romance and the idealism of the war that that one man represented for him at the moment, and also knew that the very emotions that he stood for, or that special moment itself, were fragile and could not be relived again. Once in the book Orwell credits the idealism to the inherent values of the Spaniards; to their cultural generosity and humaneness. His words “something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution” express his awe, admiration and strange tragic pity for the Spaniards all at once. It is almost as if he were saying that the Spaniards are too good to be living in this world and feeling sorry for them for the same reason.
Orwell’s description of the society in Catalonia as he sees it for the first time is very important especially because later the book contrasts this description with the changes that are obvious in just a few months. In December 1936, Orwell saw the revolution is full swing. The Anarchists were in control, industries had been collectivized, tipping was prohibited, there were no private cars, revolutionary posters could be seen all over the place, etc. He talks about there being no unemployment and no beggars, yet poverty and a severe food shortage, especially that of bread. And at the same time, bread was being wasted in the militia camps. Repeatedly the filth and chaos, and the unpreparedness and inefficiencies of the militia are mentioned. These little details represent the situation as one that was not stable, was inevitable to collapse. He implies this in retrospect especially, when he says that he overlooked to observe that many individuals could then have been impersonating as revolutionaries simply to save their skin, and the situation was not therefore as equal and liberated as it felt it was.
And yet Orwell says that what he experienced then was as close to a pure idea of equality that humans can achieve. Especially at the front, where all soldiers were equal and there were no rank or pay differences. At one point in the book, he talks about how it wasn’t as difficult to get people to obey orders even without the fear of superiors, as it may seem. And he explains how – in fact in the workers’ army discipline is a voluntary concept based on the consciousness of the need to obey, compared with that in a bourgeois army where discipline is simply based on fear. He himself uses the word “theoretically” to describe such voluntariness and one would think that such theory would be impossible to achieve in a large mass of people like a force or an army. But he surprises the reader by telling us that it did work though it took some time to get everyone to believe in it. I would however, still doubt that it could work everywhere. I rather think it needed the combination of the prevailing ‘atmosphere’ then and the inherent goodness (according to Orwell) of the Spaniards to achieve it. But that is a matter of pure opinion, and nevertheless I regard Orwell as having been lucky to have experienced such utopia.
The description of the actual war in the book, that is the days when Orwell spends at the front, reveals, as he admits, the non-war-like nature of it. Throughout the book he uses words like pantomime, racket etc. to describe the war. Add to that, the lack of weapons, fighting and battle. It is quite comic when on the front he states that most casualties were because of their own substandard weapons. Actually the dry humor comes up quite often in the days spent on the front; say for example, when Orwell says his life was saved more than once because of the marksmanship of the Spaniards. Moreover, in Orwell’s words, “the real weapon was not the rifle but the megaphone”. The whole concept of fighting by shouting at the enemy to have him convert over to your side sounded hilarious to me and so must it have to Orwell, and yet he says it was sometimes effective. Moreover, his words “deserters are actually more useful to you than corpses” brings home the logic behind it. The sad thing is that much of this kind of logic is seen to be missing from collective human minds in times of war. Most of the war described by him is defensive in nature, both at the front and during the street fighting.
The book also in a way gives an outsider’s opinion of some cultural aspects of the Spaniards. Orwell talks of them as being embarrassingly generous, chaotic, undisciplined, lacking the skills for warfare; and more so, lacking the intention to maximize their advantages in war. The humor is even more effective because as a reader one realizes that it is not his intention to sound funny, but simply that the situation was so ridiculous and laughable. According to him the very few weapons that they had were also not handed out such that the best men would have the best guns. Moreover, the few days when they receive some training before being dispatched to the front, is more an exercise in marching and not a single man is taught how to fire rifles or how to throw hand-grenades. He describes many young boys enlisting as “children” and talks of their excitement as being almost boy-scoutish. I often got the feeling that the whole thing was a matter of play for many people.
The only time he talks about the glory of war is when he is describing the sight of the Italian troops belonging to the International Column being seen off by the crowds at the Tarragona station. That vision described by him is impressive. He tells of the wounded and disabled in war cheering the fresh and healthy soldiers going off to war; and says that the sight revived the feeling that “war is glorious after all”. His words in these paragraphs bring back something of the ancient wars where there used to be codes for war and warriors were known to be brave and heroic.
Because of the manner in which Orwell brings out the political hostilities of the various parties even within the anti-Fascists, one comes off with the feeling of men being used as pawns. Very few people actually fighting are aware (according to Orwell) of what is actually going on. Each person seems to have a private reason for fighting and very often Orwell says in very clear words that facts are withheld knowingly from the forces at the front; and that sometimes this is justifiable but often not.
The feeling of men being used as pawns becomes even more emphasized when he talks of a possible reason for arresting the P.O.U.M militia being, to stop the news of the repression of the P.O.U.M. party carrying onto the front, which would discourage their people from fighting. Also he repeatedly talks of individuals from the forces of these parties as different from the minds ruling the parties. He emphasizes this by repeatedly telling the reader that away from the street fighting, all these forces were friendly with each other. And even on the front, the political rivalry could not be seen amongst the forces. The difference becomes stark Orwell explains the ban and the maligning of the P.O.U.M. which led to the hunting down of P.O.U.M. men mostly by the Communist secret police. Like he says he was never accused of being a Trotskyist or a Fascist spy by any rival forces at the front. In fact, from Orwell’s narration another point that comes across is the ineffectiveness of even the government in much of the political mishap that happened after the Barcelona street fighting. Also Orwell manages to convince the reader in the apparent autonomy of the Communist secret police which implies that they were acting under foreign interests. In fact he quotes some government officials and the evidence does seem to point at the Russian role and the helplessness of the government against it. Also the important point that Orwell manages to establish is that even the government the charges against the P.O.U.M. although they could not stop the arrests.
In comparing the situation of December 1936 with that which prevailed when Orwell returned to civil society after his first stint at the front, he describes what he called “swinging it (the revolution) back” by the Communists and Liberals; something he admits he hadn’t grasped earlier on as being possible to do. He talks about the sudden change in civil society where people had lost interest in the war, class and income divisions of society were reasserting themselves, beggars had sprung up, tipping was back in practice, the Popular Army was touted as being heroic and the other militias were blamed to be undisciplined etc., luxurious expenditures were back. And there was a general expectation of ‘trouble’ in the air.
After the street fighting in Barcelona things got even worse. Now, instead of people joining the militia voluntarily, they were being conscripted; which meant that they could no longer voluntarily quit and were regarded as ‘deserters’ if they did so. There was even worse censoring of newspapers, such that censored portions were filled up with other matter. Something that made the shortage of food worse for the people, especially so for the poor, was that there was now a shortage of small change of currency. When the P.O.U.M. was banned, it suddenly became safe to act bourgeois whereas when Orwell had first come to the country brimming with revolution, the only way to be safe was to look like a worker.
The political analysis of the war is the best treasure that the book holds. It is that, and the journalistic account of what happened during the Barcelona street fighting, that makes this book a document more than just a reference for the Spanish Civil War. Like Orwell says himself, “on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan”, no account of such a war should be believed without doubt. And yet, Orwell’s arguments and analysis are difficult to be branded as outright lies, and this is more because in most of the analysis Orwell does seem to be exposing the lies in the media rather than single someone out for blame. The book is more an effort to expose the plot to frame the P.O.U.M. party rather than to frame someone else.
His arguments are more in defence rather than an attempt at accusation and that is a more decent way to argue. In fact, Orwell himself states that earlier on in the war he was more inclined to agree with the Communist version and that he also thought it was them doing the real fighting. He is honest enough to accept that although he saw the romance in the revolution, it wasn’t easy for him to believe in the feasibility of the idea. And yet his loyalties for the P.O.U.M. party become stronger once he realized its unfair victim status in the local politics. He states some very reasonable arguments against the blame put on the P.O.U.M. (that they were Fascist spies) – and even provides post mortem analysis that reveals that the accusations on the party were never proven.
Plus, Orwell tries to give the broader picture that brings the Spanish Civil War in the context of world support and interests and Russian Communism. Orwell also has made a reasonable effort to separate words like Socialism and Communism, and to explain others like Trotskyism. The most important of these that I got from this book was the earlier mysterious concept to me of how Communism could be right-winged and of the Capitalist interests in any Communist agendas. All that he says gives a reasonable reason for how the various European countries behaved while this was going on, and how as he says “the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain” because of the interests that their investments in the country had built. The revolution was not mentioned in the foreign media because the best way to stop the revolution was to not recognize its existence.
There are however, a couple of points that Orwell makes, that one is not so convinced of, as a reader. He says that there was little doubt that arms were deliberately held from them so as to keep the Anarchists and revolutionary forces from having access to them once the fighting against Franco was over. This claim of his may or may not be true, because for once he does not give any basis for such a claim, other than the suspicion of a motive and an opportunity.
I think the most important point that the book makes, is about war propaganda. Orwell says “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” This is so true almost everywhere in the world, even if those who have fought do talk to the world, it is almost always after the war is over; and hardly ever such that it can stop the exploitation of the emotion of war. The press, and the governments (foreign or local), are the ones who take control of the war and it is almost as if they maneuver it to strike upon that which benefits them most. Such a scapegoat in this war was the P.O.U.M. the one small-numbered, weak party that had no representation in any press outside of Spain, and the party that considered the war against Fascism synonymous with revolution (suppressing them was the surest way to kill the revolution).
The details about the secret jails and imprisoned people who were never tried and were denied access to even lawyers; and their secret exterminations in prison shows the covertness of the whole incident. The entire setting reminds one of Orwell’s later Nineteen Eighty Four, as it should because he wove that story around these experiences. And yet in this book Orwell says something to the effect that after Spain, his belief in humanity grew stronger.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
mass euphoria without a just leader/direction is a dangerous thing
most people live a complacent life making the best of what they have got. its not easy to change one's conditions, environment, society etc. even if the change is highly desirable. and so most people comfortably settle down in the world around them as it is.
but most of these most also subconsciously always want to do something to bring about a desirable change. its a wish most die with. and as long as this wish is unrealized there is glued to it a feeling of failure, of incapacity, of inferiority compared with one's ideal. i have it and maybe you do too.
if not to change something then at least one wants to contribute to some higher cause. this is a compromise, an "at least". many think they achieve success with at least this compromise by forwarding an email that's supposed to benefit people in either spreading some critical information or in getting people together for some cause. doing this gives people a sense of contributing, of pushing aside their feelings of failure. and people can do quite a lot to feel that they are not failures.
in the last some years i have had a natural instinct to check every piece of information that i come across. and this naturally includes some forwarded emails i receive. some claim to be the cure to some fatal disease and passing them on will apparently save lives. others claim to be information and/or efforts to garner support for some 'good' cause. these are the emails people forward unhesitatingly, in order to rid themselves of those feelings of incapacity/inferiority/failure to bring about a change. its sad that i can confidently now (with some experience) predict that 90% of these forwards have wrong/misleading information.
sometimes its the same kind of belonging to some great thing that brings people out together to join some mass demonstration/protest/celebration. (i am not saying all mass movements are this, but sadly quite a few are). they either want to congratulate themselves for (and claim) a success that they are in no way responsible for, like the cricket World Cup win; or they want to be out there (and part of) what they think is the power of democracy to bring about a change.
if to achieve democratic success means to cripple democracy itself; then those smiling faces, singing patriotic songs and claiming to be heroes are dangerous crowds supporting blackmail. and all they had to do was to come out of their comfortable drawing rooms, look good on camera, and go along with the flow, blindly, without studying what it was they were trying to do. and they even managed to suppress that demon of failure for a little longer.
but most of these most also subconsciously always want to do something to bring about a desirable change. its a wish most die with. and as long as this wish is unrealized there is glued to it a feeling of failure, of incapacity, of inferiority compared with one's ideal. i have it and maybe you do too.
if not to change something then at least one wants to contribute to some higher cause. this is a compromise, an "at least". many think they achieve success with at least this compromise by forwarding an email that's supposed to benefit people in either spreading some critical information or in getting people together for some cause. doing this gives people a sense of contributing, of pushing aside their feelings of failure. and people can do quite a lot to feel that they are not failures.
in the last some years i have had a natural instinct to check every piece of information that i come across. and this naturally includes some forwarded emails i receive. some claim to be the cure to some fatal disease and passing them on will apparently save lives. others claim to be information and/or efforts to garner support for some 'good' cause. these are the emails people forward unhesitatingly, in order to rid themselves of those feelings of incapacity/inferiority/failure to bring about a change. its sad that i can confidently now (with some experience) predict that 90% of these forwards have wrong/misleading information.
sometimes its the same kind of belonging to some great thing that brings people out together to join some mass demonstration/protest/celebration. (i am not saying all mass movements are this, but sadly quite a few are). they either want to congratulate themselves for (and claim) a success that they are in no way responsible for, like the cricket World Cup win; or they want to be out there (and part of) what they think is the power of democracy to bring about a change.
if to achieve democratic success means to cripple democracy itself; then those smiling faces, singing patriotic songs and claiming to be heroes are dangerous crowds supporting blackmail. and all they had to do was to come out of their comfortable drawing rooms, look good on camera, and go along with the flow, blindly, without studying what it was they were trying to do. and they even managed to suppress that demon of failure for a little longer.
Monday, March 28, 2011
epiphany
the world makes too much of sex (or the lack of it), too much of morality (or the lack of it), too much of money (but not in this case, too much of the lack of it), too much of love, and too much of death. but way under-emphasizes breathing, of feeling your limbs move on their own, of the five senses and of the sixth, and of impulse and of affection and of the beauty of just be-ing...
Friday, March 25, 2011
attitude
i'm a snob and i like myself for it. and i am one, because i like myself, which means quite a bit, because i have high standards. which implies that you can like me only if i do. because otherwise i could be unpleasant. and if i like you then you've got to be something, because of the above argument of my high standards.
so you get the idea. a snob is a happy person with a small world of people.
so you get the idea. a snob is a happy person with a small world of people.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Experimentalists think they are playing a zero-sum Game against Theory
till date only theorists have really understood the potential that experiments hold for Game Theory. experimentalists just don't get it...
Schelling even as far back as the 60s said the following. that too in a tiny lil chapter titled 'Game Theory and Experimental Research'.
1. "Mathematical structure of the payoff function should not be permitted to dominate the analysis."
Experimentalists do exactly that. their subjects are shown mostly only the payoffs with the story or the game being hidden in 'neutral' language in order not to suggest any play to them. thus, hopelessly eliminating Schelling's elegant theory of the power of suggestion. reducing the game to a mathematical problem, if the subject wants to solve it; which very often he does not. what is this a test of? not of Game Theory as I see it and as it pretends to be.
2. "There is a danger in too much abstractness: we change the character of the game when we drastically alter the amount of contextual detail that it contains or when we eliminate such complicating factors as the players' uncertainties about each others' value systems."
Related to 1. above. the laboratory hides the game in what is shown to the subjects.
3. "Some essential part of the study of mixed-motive games is necessarily empirical."
This, the most important point experimentalists almost seem to never understand. that purely analytical means a-priori will never fully be able to predict what people will actually do. analytical methods rather predict what is stable play, or what is equilibrium play, or in simple words, what is clever play. whether this clever play is perceived by people or even when it is, whether they choose to play it or not is unknown till it happens.
especially with regard to the third point, Schelling points out how experiments could help Game Theory by exploring when and how do people actually play (or not) the stable strategy.
but its been wasted on researchers who simply do not understand the intent of the effort of Theory...
Schelling even as far back as the 60s said the following. that too in a tiny lil chapter titled 'Game Theory and Experimental Research'.
1. "Mathematical structure of the payoff function should not be permitted to dominate the analysis."
Experimentalists do exactly that. their subjects are shown mostly only the payoffs with the story or the game being hidden in 'neutral' language in order not to suggest any play to them. thus, hopelessly eliminating Schelling's elegant theory of the power of suggestion. reducing the game to a mathematical problem, if the subject wants to solve it; which very often he does not. what is this a test of? not of Game Theory as I see it and as it pretends to be.
2. "There is a danger in too much abstractness: we change the character of the game when we drastically alter the amount of contextual detail that it contains or when we eliminate such complicating factors as the players' uncertainties about each others' value systems."
Related to 1. above. the laboratory hides the game in what is shown to the subjects.
3. "Some essential part of the study of mixed-motive games is necessarily empirical."
This, the most important point experimentalists almost seem to never understand. that purely analytical means a-priori will never fully be able to predict what people will actually do. analytical methods rather predict what is stable play, or what is equilibrium play, or in simple words, what is clever play. whether this clever play is perceived by people or even when it is, whether they choose to play it or not is unknown till it happens.
especially with regard to the third point, Schelling points out how experiments could help Game Theory by exploring when and how do people actually play (or not) the stable strategy.
but its been wasted on researchers who simply do not understand the intent of the effort of Theory...
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
i want to make my home now. its been a long childhood, and clinging to it stubbornly, i have grown up. bring on the clutter of a functional chaotic home. lots of crockery, pots and pans. create a little colorful India within these walls.
painted glass splitting the morning rays of the sun into my home. colored cotton and lace curtains flying in the gentle breeze. the rustle of trees and the twitter of early birds as i step into the patio with my mug of milk. a rocking chair. a wind chime. tabla playing in the background...
a bedroom flooded with sunlight in the winter. with cane and bamboo chairs. a solid old fashioned bed and lots of hardwood furniture. photographs and paintings on all walls. and a huge globe of the world somewhere. a tiny room with bookshelves lining up all walls, and books, books and some bean bags. a spotless dry tiny bathroom. a cosy kitchen and dining table. an apron and song and dance and cooking. a masaledaar lunch.
candles all around the place being lighted as the day gets darker. some sofas to jump on and wear off the afternoon laziness. wood, lots of it. large wooden table tops. clear and clean. glistening in the lamplights. painted walls. seashells and bead curtains around the place. gulab jamuns and rosogullas. garam rotis, freshly made. a contented life. long walks. a good night under the starlit sky
painted glass splitting the morning rays of the sun into my home. colored cotton and lace curtains flying in the gentle breeze. the rustle of trees and the twitter of early birds as i step into the patio with my mug of milk. a rocking chair. a wind chime. tabla playing in the background...
a bedroom flooded with sunlight in the winter. with cane and bamboo chairs. a solid old fashioned bed and lots of hardwood furniture. photographs and paintings on all walls. and a huge globe of the world somewhere. a tiny room with bookshelves lining up all walls, and books, books and some bean bags. a spotless dry tiny bathroom. a cosy kitchen and dining table. an apron and song and dance and cooking. a masaledaar lunch.
candles all around the place being lighted as the day gets darker. some sofas to jump on and wear off the afternoon laziness. wood, lots of it. large wooden table tops. clear and clean. glistening in the lamplights. painted walls. seashells and bead curtains around the place. gulab jamuns and rosogullas. garam rotis, freshly made. a contented life. long walks. a good night under the starlit sky
Monday, March 7, 2011
imagine a white canvas and dripping blue paint on it. blue like the nearest bit of the spring sky. blue like MS Windows. only v near to the sun this blue should fade a lil. and then in contrast to it, imagine a dark brown, dried up-survived winter bark of a tree. and leafless branches, dark dark brown. with fresh, newly born tiny lil white blooms. all over. from in between and through these white-brown branches, stare at the blue of the sky. forever.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
never seen such ice before
one of those 'first times' that always stick out in one's memory
a frozen stream of water right out my window. a sheet of ice on all smooth surfaces outside. and patchy white snow. guys playing ice-hockey and slipping and falling on the ice. a mattress sledge tied to a truck with an excited woman-undergrad enjoying a ride on it. a walk in this frozen world with aching fingers and a running nose. and the soles of my shoes and the uprightness of my body letting me down with a thud on the icy road more than once. a few hurried clicks of my camera while my near-dead hands fumble. the gloves are useless. and then finally just when the cold keys were being turned in to let myself into my warm apartment, the realization that important documents that were supposed to be under my arm were not, and that in maintaining my balance they must have been unconsciously sacrificed. a hunt for them, another slip-and-fall, and finally the recovery. a warm end, a self-curse and a promise not to step out till the world thawed.
a frozen stream of water right out my window. a sheet of ice on all smooth surfaces outside. and patchy white snow. guys playing ice-hockey and slipping and falling on the ice. a mattress sledge tied to a truck with an excited woman-undergrad enjoying a ride on it. a walk in this frozen world with aching fingers and a running nose. and the soles of my shoes and the uprightness of my body letting me down with a thud on the icy road more than once. a few hurried clicks of my camera while my near-dead hands fumble. the gloves are useless. and then finally just when the cold keys were being turned in to let myself into my warm apartment, the realization that important documents that were supposed to be under my arm were not, and that in maintaining my balance they must have been unconsciously sacrificed. a hunt for them, another slip-and-fall, and finally the recovery. a warm end, a self-curse and a promise not to step out till the world thawed.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
William Manchester in 'Goodbye Darkness' (Pacific war WWII)
this just had to be quoted for preservation...
"Not only was he the first Japanese soldier I had ever shot at; he was the only one I had seen at close quarters. He was a robin-fat, moon-faced, roly-poly little man with his thick, stubby, trunk-like legs sheathed in faded khaki puttees and the rest of him squeezed into a uniform that was much too tight. Unlike me, he was wearing a tin hat, dressed to kill. But I was quite safe from him. His Arisaka rifle was strapped on in a sniper's harness, and though he had heard me, and was trying to turn toward me, the harness sling had him trapped. He couldn't disengage himself from it. His eyes were rolling in panic. Realizing that he couldn't extricate his arms and defend himself, he was backing toward a corner with a curious, crablike motion.
My first shot had missed him, embedding itself in the straw wall, but the second caught him dead-on in the femoral artery. His left thigh blossomed, swiftly turning to mush. A wave of blood gushed from the wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor. Mutely he looked down at it. He dipped a hand in it and listlessly smeared his cheek red. His shoulders gave a spasmodic jerk, as though someone had whacked him on the back; then he emitted a tremendous, raspy fart, slumped down, and died. I kept firing, wasting government property. Already I thought I detected the dark brown effluvium of the freshly slain, a sour, pervasive emanation which is different from anything you have known. Yet seeing death at this range, like smelling it, requires no previous experience. You instantly recognize it, the spastic convulsion and the rattle, which in his case was not loud, but deprecating and conciliatory, like the manners of the civilian Japanese. He continued to sink until he reached the earthen floor. His eyes glazed over. Almost immediately a fly landed on his left eyeball. It was joined by another. I don't know how long I stood there staring. I knew from previous combat what lay ahead for the corpse. It would swell, then bloat, bursting out of the uniform. Then the face would turn from yellow to red, to purple, to green, to black. My father's account of the Argonne had omitted certain vital facts. A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me.
Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new, fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble, and next, to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: "I'm sorry." Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the cordite. At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies. I pondered fleetly why our excretions become so loathsome the instant they leave the body. Then Barney burst in on me, his carbine at the ready, his face gray, as though he, not I, had just a become a partner in the firm of death. He ran over to the Nip's body, grabbed its stacking swivel - its neck - and let go, satisfied that it was a cadaver. I marveled at his courage; I couldn't have taken a step toward that corner. He approached me and then backed away in revulsion, from my foul stench. He said: "Slim, you stink." I said nothing. I knew I had become a thing of tears and twitchings and dirtied pants. I remember wondering dumbly: Is that what they mean by 'conspicuous gallantry'?"
"Not only was he the first Japanese soldier I had ever shot at; he was the only one I had seen at close quarters. He was a robin-fat, moon-faced, roly-poly little man with his thick, stubby, trunk-like legs sheathed in faded khaki puttees and the rest of him squeezed into a uniform that was much too tight. Unlike me, he was wearing a tin hat, dressed to kill. But I was quite safe from him. His Arisaka rifle was strapped on in a sniper's harness, and though he had heard me, and was trying to turn toward me, the harness sling had him trapped. He couldn't disengage himself from it. His eyes were rolling in panic. Realizing that he couldn't extricate his arms and defend himself, he was backing toward a corner with a curious, crablike motion.
My first shot had missed him, embedding itself in the straw wall, but the second caught him dead-on in the femoral artery. His left thigh blossomed, swiftly turning to mush. A wave of blood gushed from the wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor. Mutely he looked down at it. He dipped a hand in it and listlessly smeared his cheek red. His shoulders gave a spasmodic jerk, as though someone had whacked him on the back; then he emitted a tremendous, raspy fart, slumped down, and died. I kept firing, wasting government property. Already I thought I detected the dark brown effluvium of the freshly slain, a sour, pervasive emanation which is different from anything you have known. Yet seeing death at this range, like smelling it, requires no previous experience. You instantly recognize it, the spastic convulsion and the rattle, which in his case was not loud, but deprecating and conciliatory, like the manners of the civilian Japanese. He continued to sink until he reached the earthen floor. His eyes glazed over. Almost immediately a fly landed on his left eyeball. It was joined by another. I don't know how long I stood there staring. I knew from previous combat what lay ahead for the corpse. It would swell, then bloat, bursting out of the uniform. Then the face would turn from yellow to red, to purple, to green, to black. My father's account of the Argonne had omitted certain vital facts. A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me.
Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new, fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble, and next, to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: "I'm sorry." Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the cordite. At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies. I pondered fleetly why our excretions become so loathsome the instant they leave the body. Then Barney burst in on me, his carbine at the ready, his face gray, as though he, not I, had just a become a partner in the firm of death. He ran over to the Nip's body, grabbed its stacking swivel - its neck - and let go, satisfied that it was a cadaver. I marveled at his courage; I couldn't have taken a step toward that corner. He approached me and then backed away in revulsion, from my foul stench. He said: "Slim, you stink." I said nothing. I knew I had become a thing of tears and twitchings and dirtied pants. I remember wondering dumbly: Is that what they mean by 'conspicuous gallantry'?"
Thursday, December 23, 2010
charlie in dallas
I’m bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.
To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,
I’m bound for Texas land,
I’ll sing her a song,
At the end of the day,
A song that will drive all our cares away,
I’ll sing out (in) the prairie,
The blue starry skies,
And the stars shining bright in her eyes,
I’m bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.
To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,
I’m bound for Texas land,
I’m tried of the city,
Of smoke stack and steel,
I’m tried of the grind,
Of the factory wheel,
I’m spreading my wings,
And I’m ready to fly,
To the land of the wide open sky,
I’ll save up my money,
And look for a wife,
A wife who be true,
And a pal for life,
I’ll build her a home,
And a room for a child,
With the roses, around growing wild,
I’m bound for Texas land,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.
To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,
I’m bound for Texas land,
I’ll sing her a song,
At the end of the day,
A song that will drive all our cares away,
I’ll sing out (in) the prairie,
The blue starry skies,
And the stars shining bright in her eyes,
I’m bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.
To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,
I’m bound for Texas land,
I’m tried of the city,
Of smoke stack and steel,
I’m tried of the grind,
Of the factory wheel,
I’m spreading my wings,
And I’m ready to fly,
To the land of the wide open sky,
I’ll save up my money,
And look for a wife,
A wife who be true,
And a pal for life,
I’ll build her a home,
And a room for a child,
With the roses, around growing wild,
I’m bound for Texas land,
Friday, December 17, 2010
some days ago someone asked me why India's attitude toward Britain wasn't like that of the colonized for the imperialist. there was no antagonism, no hard feelings. i don't think i explained it well. all that came to my mind was "its more like a parent-child relationship, you mean?". its actually quite like that but of a child now far outgrown her parent, distant in emotions and attachments, and one who doesn't think of or visit her parent too often. and yet in lil manners realizes how her parent's grooming has created her.
even today speaking english in this country, in the tea versus the coffee; i sometimes feel British. in the arguments - for the usage of 'queue' against the word 'line'; in my difficulty to understand 'aunt' pronounced as 'ant'...
Naipaul, in describing his first visit to India explains this so much better. in the India of the 50-60s where the British-ness must have been so much fresher:
"They coexist; the society only pretends to be colonial; and for this reason its absurdities are at once apparent. Its mimicry is both less and more than a colonial mimicry. It is the special mimicry of an old country which has been without a native aristocracy for a thousand years and has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. And so it happens that, to one whole area of India, a late seventeenth-century traveller like Ovington remains in many ways a reliable guide. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English.
Mimicry might be too harsh a word for what appears so comprehensive and profound: buildings, railways, a system of administration, the intellectual discipline of the civil servant and the economist. Schizophrenia might better explain the scientist who, before taking up his appointment, consults the astrologer for an auspicious day. But mimicry must be used because so much has been acquired that the schizophrenia is often concealed; because so much of what is seen remains simple mimicry, incongruous and absurd; and because no people, by their varied physical endowments, are as capable of mimicry as the Indians. The Indian army officer is at a first meeting a complete English army officer. He even manages to look English; his gait and bearing are English; his mannerisms his tastes in drink are English; his slang is English. In the Indian setting this Indian English mimicry is like fantasy. It is an undiminishing absurdity; and it is only slowly that one formulates what was sensed from the first day; this is a mimicry not of England, a real country, but of the fairytale land of Anglo-India, of clubs and sahibs and syces and bearers. It is as if an entire society has fallen for a casual confidence trickster. Casual because the trickster has gone away, losing interest in his joke, but leaving the Anglo-Indians flocking to the churches of Calcutta on a Sunday morning to assert the alien faith, more or less abandoned in its country of origin; leaving Freddy crying, 'Just bung your coat down there Andy;' leaving the officer exclaiming, 'I say, by Jove! I feel rather bushed.' Leaving 'civil lines', 'cantonments', leaving people 'going off to the hills': magic words now fully possessed, now spoken as of right, in what is now at last Indian Anglo-India, where smartness can be found in the cosy proletarian trivialities of Woman's Own and the Daily Mirror and where Mrs Hauksbee, a Millamant of the suburbs, is still the arbiter of elegance.
But room has been left at the top, and out of this mimicry a new aristocracy is being essayed, not of politicians or civil servants, but of the business executives of foreign, mostly British, firms. To them, the box-wallahs as they are called, have gone the privileges India reserves for the foreign and conquering; ..."
i wonder who we are aping now... as google underlines my spelling which was correct in the old English dictionaries...
even today speaking english in this country, in the tea versus the coffee; i sometimes feel British. in the arguments - for the usage of 'queue' against the word 'line'; in my difficulty to understand 'aunt' pronounced as 'ant'...
Naipaul, in describing his first visit to India explains this so much better. in the India of the 50-60s where the British-ness must have been so much fresher:
"They coexist; the society only pretends to be colonial; and for this reason its absurdities are at once apparent. Its mimicry is both less and more than a colonial mimicry. It is the special mimicry of an old country which has been without a native aristocracy for a thousand years and has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. And so it happens that, to one whole area of India, a late seventeenth-century traveller like Ovington remains in many ways a reliable guide. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English.
Mimicry might be too harsh a word for what appears so comprehensive and profound: buildings, railways, a system of administration, the intellectual discipline of the civil servant and the economist. Schizophrenia might better explain the scientist who, before taking up his appointment, consults the astrologer for an auspicious day. But mimicry must be used because so much has been acquired that the schizophrenia is often concealed; because so much of what is seen remains simple mimicry, incongruous and absurd; and because no people, by their varied physical endowments, are as capable of mimicry as the Indians. The Indian army officer is at a first meeting a complete English army officer. He even manages to look English; his gait and bearing are English; his mannerisms his tastes in drink are English; his slang is English. In the Indian setting this Indian English mimicry is like fantasy. It is an undiminishing absurdity; and it is only slowly that one formulates what was sensed from the first day; this is a mimicry not of England, a real country, but of the fairytale land of Anglo-India, of clubs and sahibs and syces and bearers. It is as if an entire society has fallen for a casual confidence trickster. Casual because the trickster has gone away, losing interest in his joke, but leaving the Anglo-Indians flocking to the churches of Calcutta on a Sunday morning to assert the alien faith, more or less abandoned in its country of origin; leaving Freddy crying, 'Just bung your coat down there Andy;' leaving the officer exclaiming, 'I say, by Jove! I feel rather bushed.' Leaving 'civil lines', 'cantonments', leaving people 'going off to the hills': magic words now fully possessed, now spoken as of right, in what is now at last Indian Anglo-India, where smartness can be found in the cosy proletarian trivialities of Woman's Own and the Daily Mirror and where Mrs Hauksbee, a Millamant of the suburbs, is still the arbiter of elegance.
But room has been left at the top, and out of this mimicry a new aristocracy is being essayed, not of politicians or civil servants, but of the business executives of foreign, mostly British, firms. To them, the box-wallahs as they are called, have gone the privileges India reserves for the foreign and conquering; ..."
i wonder who we are aping now... as google underlines my spelling which was correct in the old English dictionaries...
Friday, November 19, 2010
every little jigsaw of every man and every woman in this world fits in and is designed to do so; conditional on every other lil idiosyncratic fit they each may share with numerous others. the world accommodates, revises, blends out; the gaps and protrusions of people to form the big painting of human relationships
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
pointless but happy
its been a sweet life these few days. in the real sense. bars of snickers and cookies and sweet banana chips. peppered here there strongly with jalapeno-ed potato chips. and chipotle and mexican hot sauce. and its beginning to show on my hips. the more my brain works the more my tummy greeds for. not forgeting the sweetly warm sun thats making me a browner shade of honey, where i sit for an hour munching on my hersheys bar. life is good and hungry
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