10 Lives and 10 Books..

The following information is gleaned from the Weekly Quiz that appears in the Hindu Literary Review. On 24-11-2019, the quiz featured Life writings - autobiographies and biographies. Here is a list of books written by people about their lives or someone else's life. As a preface to the Quiz, the curator @bertyashley gives a meaningful quote - 'Biography should be written by an acute enemy' - Arthur Balfour. 

An autobiographical account of an animal that a little girl had a love for Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

A cricketer who was a qualified doctor is celebrated by the biographer Richard Tomlinson in the biography titled- Amazing Grace by W.G Grace

British Comedian and writer David Mitchell wrote a memoir about his childhood, schooling and career. The title of the memoir is Backstory 

This exiled religious leader who sought asylum in India wrote two autobiographies - Freedom in Exile and My Land and My People - He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The name of the author is Dalai Lama. 

Sunny Days is the autobiography written by Sunil Gavaskar. 

Tall, Dark and Gruesome is the autobiography of Sir Christopher Lee. 

Corey Feldman, the American actor and performer wrote his autobiography titled - Coreyography. 

A Prison Diary is the autobiography written by an author whose books are all bestsellers. His name is Jefferey Archer. 

Gene Simmons is the bassist and co-founder of rock band Kiss. His autobiography is titled Kiss and Make-up. 

Jim Moir who is popular by his stage name Vic Reeves published his autobiography titled Me: Moir. 

Gospel of Yudas - K.R Meera

K R Meera and Writing 

In the Gospel of Yudas, K.R Meera weaves a tale of intense female experience which is a result of her rich journalistic life coupled with her writerly ambitions. K.R Meera is the first woman to be hired by the newspaper Malayala Manorama. K.R Meera’s popular novel Aarachar - Hangwoman is also highly female-centred and it narrates the story of the first woman executioner. A highly socially committed writer, she has developed a craft which appeals to both the high -literature followers and the masses. She believes that writing is a way to repair her own life. She describes her act of writing as an act of revenge against the treatment of women in the patriarchal society. When she writes, her mind is so embedded in the experience of the character. One can see three types of trauma when it comes to K.R Meera’s craft - The trauma that she feels when writing, the trauma embedded in the story and the trauma of the reader who is reading. Her tales doesn’t have any ‘cushioning effect’. She reminds us of Tolstoy who was a pioneer of realistic fiction. The novel is intense and dark. Since she is a felt-writer K.R Meera says that she needed time to get out of the mould of the characters that she has created.K.R Meera talks about her experience of writing hard-hitting realistic stories as ‘not an easy task because I had to experience everything in every cell of mine'. 

Themes of Death: 

One of the primary themes in the Gospel of Judas is the theme of death. Das the character is busy dredging dead bodies from the river. He does this act in different rivers and different river banks. These acts make him an archetypal figure engaged in a routine which reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus and the story of Naranath Bhranthan in the Malayalam folklore. He is known as the Crocodile (Croc) Yudas for his diving skills. He is an amphibian living in a thatched hut on the river bank and spending too much time in the water. Most of the deaths happening around him are suicides. The dead bodies that are taken out of the river as shapeless and formless due to the nibbling away of flesh by fishes. The way Das is etched bring to our mind the character of Najeeb Muhammad in Benyamin’s classic Aadujeevitham. 

The theme of Guilt: 

Like Dr Faustus in the 12th scene of Marlowe's play, Yu-das is yearning for redemption. His sin, like that of Lord Jim, is that he had betrayed his Naxalite comrades during the Emergency period raids and the subsequent torture in the infamous Kakkayam camp. Yu-Das lives in his world of guilt and pain, haunted by the memories of his past. The novel begins with the admission of this guilt which like an albatross is hanging on his shoulders. 

"A traitor can never sleep. His hunger is eternal; his thirst, insatiable. The burning inside his body won’t be doused even if he immerses himself in water. No matter how hard he tries to drown himself in alcohol, he remains intensely conscious". Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 3). 

The theme of Love:  

The character of Prema is the mouthpiece of the author. She is an independent woman who makes decisions of her own. She has seen her father as a terror figure who used to engage in domestic violence. The violence became a routine for Prema once he retired from the Police department. He was on duty at the Kakkayam police camp which specialized in different torture forms. The most infamous form of torture was the 'roller'. After retirement, he suffers from Post-traumatic stress disorder. Towards the fag end of his life, he becomes bedridden with Parkinson's disease. He is the one who identifies Yudas as Das. Prema like the housekeeping girl Elisa Esposito played by Sally Hawkins in the movie Shape of Water is curious to know more about the amphibian - Yudas. The novel moves forward as a result of this quest by Prema. She hunts Yu-das wherever he goes. Longing for his love, I looked everywhere for a glimpse of Yudas’s shadow. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (pp. 32-33).She sees him as free-spirit and she wants to escape with him. For Yu-das, tender emotions are all a thing of the past. Yu-das was dead long ago and now he dredges dead bodies for a living. One of the poignant observation about love is 'None of us has ever had anyone else’s love. Life had always unfolded under an emergency of some kind. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (pp. 57-58). 

The Political Theme: 

Gospel of Yudas is an intensely political novel. K.R Meera uses the backdrop of the Emergency days to bring out a narrative which is intermingled with the Naxalite uprising of Kerala in the 1970s.  Through Prema, the author says that the Emergency 'purged the young things’ audacity and grit to love, trust and fight'. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 37).Das was arrested and kept in inhumane conditions of a room in the Kakkayam camp. ‘The most vivid memory of that time will always be a certain room that was darkened, its windows padded with cardboard rags. It stank horribly the moment I walked in. Was it pee, shit, blood or death? People screamed dreadfully all the time. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 45).  Prema like a journalist goes to dig the past of Yu-das. She even visits the houses of former Naxalites and quizzes them about the events that happened. K.R Meera skillfully blends the past and the present in the novel. Prema in her quest to find more about Yu-das meets Sangeetha who is the niece of a former Naxalite. Sangeetha in the present world is engaged in a people's protest to prevent private mining companies from occupying their farmlands. The author brings back the memories of the Emergency times when she writes 'Revolutions do not cease. Little people persist with their might wherever they are'. Meera, K R. The Gospel of Yudas (p. 118). 

The theme of Naming or Labelling (Identity)  

Gospel of Yudas is significant for the names of the characters. There is one pertinent question that K R Meera is trying to answer in this novel - How did Das become Yu-das?. Before becoming Yu-das, Das was a student and he was a slave to the ideology of Naxalism but after the torture camp experience in Kakkayam, he became a betrayer - just like Judas in the Bible. Y-das betrayed his colleagues by sharing information about them with the police. His life is his Gospel and Prema is an admirer of Yu-das. The name Prema reminds the reader about love and its balmy effect. What will make the world a better place, is it love or is it violence? The contradiction in the title is quite evident. Gospel is supposed to be a holy text with some moralistic messages. Ironically, this is the Gospel of Yudas, the one betrayed Son of God who had come to save humanity. Will this Gospel turn out to be a panacea to the problems of this world. We may have to wait and watch. 

References: 

https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/da0MI0UGvgjZ77gPEf4M6O/Writing-is-my-revenge-KR-Meera.html

Image source: https://scroll.in/article/810053/malayalam-writer-kr-meera-writes-explosively-and-her-new-novel-is-no-exception

New Semester, New Us

A new academic semester began today. After metamorphosing myself into the new official avatar I entered the classroom with the sole objective of making the students think independently and I made them think about their immediate academic past. The semester began with a review session of the just concluded University exams. In the world of literary critics and post-modern theorists, it is termed as 'analepsis'. In layman's language - flashback. To make the language more figurative it can be termed as 'a trip down the memory lane' The activity in my class today had the following objectives:

1. To encourage students to think critically and voice their own opinion. 

2. To conduct informal minor research based on the topic:  General English/University Exam -     

    Experience Sharing 

3. To make the students speak/communicate

4. To make the students aware of the importance of the feedback system.

5. To get to know the students' linguistic level through a result-driven informal interaction. 

In the first class which I attended this afternoon, students were pretty satisfied with their University exams. One boy stood up and told that he found it difficult to write exams seated in a room which was not his classroom. He said that he felt strange and eerie inside these rooms which were in some unexplored areas of the campus. Two girls shared the same opinion that they had problems related to time management. The stipulated three hours was not just enough for them to pen down their answers. One girl bemoaned the fact that she was not able to fill up the 42 pages which are the number of pages found in a University answer booklet. 

In the next class, which was a foundation English I year class, I was able to witness two cases of students' apathy towards learning. This made me realize that there is an extreme need for the teachers’ sympathy and empathy. In the first instance, one boy found it difficult to get the English word for 'nail'. He was able to communicate the word in his mother tongue. I found the experience quite bewildering. The second student was not able to express in English his excuse for arriving late to the class. He wanted to convey that he got up late and he missed the train. It was indeed shocking that the students are not able to convey simple thoughts in simple English. I really should do something to address these issues and help these students to come up in their lives. Will be posting more about this journey and the tales from my ESL classrooms. 

Interpreters and Translators

           

                                            

This post is based on one section from the book ‘Talking to Strangers’ by Malcolm Gladwell, where he talks about the historic meeting between the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II in the 16th century. The meeting happened in the city of Tenochtitlan. A city which was much advanced in its technology when compared to the Spanish cities. It had ‘grand boulevards, elaborate aqueducts…public gardens and even a zoo’ and it was ‘spotlessly clean.’ One thing which aroused my interest in this encounter was the way these two figures interacted with each other. The only language that Cortes knew was Spanish. In his entourage, there were two interpreters/translators. An Indian woman named Malinche, who was held by the captive by the Spanish and she knew the Aztec s which were Nahuatl and Mayan. Cortes also had in his company a Spanish priest Geronimo del Aguilar who knew Mayan because he was shipwrecked in a Yucatan island. Cortez spoke to Geronimo in Spanish. Aguilar translated the same into Mayan for Malinche who translated Mayan into Nahuatl for Montezuma. Malcolm Gladwell describes this communication in these words “The kind of easy face-to-face interaction that each had lived with his entire life had suddenly become hopelessly complicated” - Excerpt From Malcolm Gladwell. “Talking to Strangers.” Apple Books.

                                                   

Fast forward to the present. A few weeks ago, the Chinese President Xi Jinping met the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mahabalipuram. When watching the videos of the informal summit in the YouTube channel of DD news, I was fascinated by the presence of the two translators/interpreters who were positioned right behind the two leaders. It was great to watch how these two were listening to every word that the leaders spoke. The two interpreters followed Modiji and Xi wherever they went. They were even travelling with them in the golf buggy which took the two leaders to their meeting place inside the Taj Fisherman's Cove Resort & Spa. 

The world of interpreters/translators took me to the world of literary translation. I am excited to note that this virtual space once hosted Dr E.V Fathima who translated the book by Subhash Chandran into English. My professor at St. Joseph’s College Devagiri, Calicut has translated Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis into Malayalam. I came upon this post by the author Benyamin in Facebook announcing that his book Jasmine Days is longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Prize. A visit to the website will take us to the world of books. https://dublinliteraryaward.ie/book-category/2020 I have added a few book titles here which are all works of translation.
  

                                     

Gospel of Yudas Reviewed...

This post discusses the book cover of the novel – The Gospel of Yudas by K.R Meera. The cover reminded me of the short story by Marquez – The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World and also of the cinema poster of the movie – ‘Shape of Water’ by the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro (Pronounced: ghee-YAIR-mo del TOR-o)

The water bodies like a river or an ocean are scary for its depth and the quality of making objects float. Marine biologists are always fascinated by the presence of a world inside in these depths. Authors and filmmakers borrow heavily on this idea of mysteriousness – Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has a brilliant book cover which tells us about the mysteries of the deep. The Abyss by James Cameron showcases the darker side of these depths. Literariness is when we compare the depths of the sea to the depths of the human mind. Remember the one-liner from Titanic (again it is James Cameron) “A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets” lipped by the character Rose DeWitt Bukater. K.R Meera’s work is also heavily inspired by the Greek mythological reference of The Charon, whose duty it was to ferry over the Rivers Styx the souls of the deceased. 

Reading Challenges and Me

Dear reader, Greetings. It has been a while since I did some serious reading. I recently decided to delve into my world of teaching and research. The day, the decision was officially approved, I was invited to join the Whatsapp based reading club - Readers' Rendevouz. I fondly remember the good times we had in RR where we did everything possible to break the boundaries of a WhatsApp based reading group. I also remember the lovely books which I read only because of RR – Ignorance by Milan Kundera, 21 lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari, Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, The Gospel of Yudas by K.R Meera, Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, and now reading – Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. The four books which I read without being a member of RR were – The trilogy novels of R.K Narayan – (Swami and friends, Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher) and Milk Teeth by Amrita Mahale. 

Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers - Initial thoughts

Reading the e-book and listening to the audio version of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book is an enthralling experience. The audiobook is quite different from the e-book since it has a piece of unique background music and the real recorded testimonies of all the ‘strangers’ whom the author meets. The audiobook is more like an audio-documentary. The book opens with a disturbing story. Gladwell talks about the story of Sandra Bland, an African American woman who was found hanging in her cell on July 13, 2015, after her arrest by a state trooper for a minor traffic violation. She had her own YouTube channel and the link is given below. I have attached three video links here. One is to her own channel Sandy Speaks and the other two videos are about the case (Viewer discretion is advised)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQVtPYC_AYY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGnENyG3Aq4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsTgyabGtL4&list=PLMkogOT3Op_DO7CxQWwKU-BQEuN8sN3vW&index=29

Malcolm Gladwell is my favourite non-fiction writer after Yuval Noah Harari. I like him for four books – What the Dog Saw, Focus, David and Goliath and Outliers. I have not read his Tipping Point and Blink. I hope to read them shortly. Malcolm Gladwell is my favourite because he writes about topics which are quite common but his ways of building the argument are something unique. He is easy to understand and most of his books are well-researched. 

The book 'Talking to Strangers" is dedicated to his father who died in the year 2017. (Malcolm is the son of an English father, Graham Gladwell and Afro-Jamaican mother, Joyce Gladwell) In the first chapter, Malcolm talks about the police injustice that was meted out to Sandra Bland. To quote from the book  “There are bad cops. There are biased cops. Conservatives prefer the former interpretation, liberals the latter. In the end, the two sides cancelled each other out. Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things. I don’t want to move on to other things” (Excerpt From Malcolm Gladwell. “Talking to Strangers.” Apple Books.) 

We can find parallels between this book and the other two books I am re/reading right now – The Gospel of Yudas by K.R Meera which is about the Kakkayam Police camp during the Emergency period and the other book is Hello Bastar – The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement by Rahul Pandita. There are numerous contemporary connections to these two books which I will talk about in my next post. Happy Reading