Review of Vitasta Raina's Novella: Writer’s Block

Amazon Books

Vitasta Raina, urban planner and architect, lives and works in Mumbai, India, where she composed her novella, Writer's Block. The pun on block as "impediment" and block as "city unit" is intentional, and writers living in the block might or might not experience writer's block. Some do, some don't, but for the most part, the writers living there seem sufficiently ruly and productive.

But the city Chalet and its residents, the so-called charlatans, are about to undergo a crisis.

However, I don't want to reveal many plot spoilers. I will therefore offer a few thoughts. The story covers about 64 pages and focuses on the lives of eight writers, who are called "CAST," and distributes them across eight chapters (8x8=64), the last of which is titled, "While the Credits Roll," as if the novella were a motion picture. The first seven chapters are identified as "epiphanies," which would make them divinely inspired insights, and the subtitles read like a continuous poem of free verse style with occasional rhyme, as here on the first page:

I am if I choose to be
But I have no choice
In these million years of evolution
I have finally lost my voice (page 1)

The chapters are prose of native speaker quality, the sentences often of complex length, but nevertheless concise and clear. For example, here is a sentence describing a model of the city:

"Representing a city that in the last decadal cycle of the City Census estimated almost sixty percent of the inhabitants as parasite slum dwellers, the model displayed high rise residential estates, office complexes, shopping arcades, golf courses and a meandering network of transit corridors, flyovers and flyunders connecting the ends, the edges, the fringes and the cores of Chalet." (page 9)

The model is of an idealized Chalet, and mickle are the ways this city could be represented, extremes of poverty and riches, of asceticism and gluttony, of good and bad, of weak and strong, a list that could go on and on.

But the electricity abruptly stops working, and so does everything else, most significantly, the elevators. At that severe inconvenience, Chalet is turned upside down, literally, as the rich pour into the streets and the poor ricochet up to the penthouses. Still, life goes on, for most of the writers, who are stuck in the middle, neither rich nor poor, and Chalet goes on as well. This is all along expected as one reads this slender volume, but the details make for the difference, and for the unexpected.

Five Stars out of Five!

Ronald J. Granieri on a True Quote for the EU: Franz Josef Strauß

Franz Josef Strauß (1982)
(September 6, 1915 - October 3, 1988)
Wikipedia

I've just read Ronald J. Granieri's "Europe: What Went Wrong?" (E-Notes, January 2015), and amidst the problems that threaten the European project, Granieri notes at least one undeniable truth, a truth uttered by the German politician Franz Josef Strauß, who despite numerous brushes with scandal and despite his Bavarian provincialism, considered himself, above all, a European:

One hears the skeptics more, of course, especially in [the US] . . . , and especially among those who consider themselves to be practical realists. They dismiss Europe as a chimera and praise the nation-state, even as individual European nation-states obviously cannot stand up to the continental challenges of China, Russia, India, and even the United States - none of which are nation-states on the classical European model. We do not have any leaders of the practical stature of the great Bavarian conservative statesman Franz Josef Strauss, who rejected "the idea that any European state - no matter its name, no matter how glorious its history, no matter how impressive its traditions - will be recognized in Moscow as an equal partner. One cannot ignore the laws of mathematics."

I count myself among those who want the EU project to succeed - one of the reasons being the one noted above in the words of Franz Josef Strauß, that only Europe as a whole has sufficient weight for dealing not only with Russia, but also with China, India, and even the US - but I think that Islamist-driven Islamization (within and without Europe) is not taken seriously enough by Granieri. If the EU fails, we may be watching not merely the collapse of one, but rather of two intertwined civilizations, Western and Islamic . . .

Hyper-Conversion . . . or Hyped Conversion?

India

Photo by Gary Gnidovic

(Image from Christianity Today)

I found of interest this article, "India's Grassroots Revival," written by Tim Stafford for Christianity Today (July 8, 2011) on conversions to Christianity in India, which are apparently occuring rather rapidly these days, but the magazine might be hyping this a bit:

With its people turning to Christ in waves, India hosts more believers now than at any time in its 4,000-year history.

Given that Christianity has been around for only about 2000 years, I wouldn't be astonished to hear that there are more Christians in India now than any time before Christ, but upon reading the article, I discovered that the comparison was only between now and any time since Christ. Here are some figures:

The newly Christian India is found mostly at the bottom rung of society, among . . . typically poor and illiterate "broken people" (the literal meaning of Dalit). Numbering 140 million or more, Dalits and Tribals (a grouping similar to the Dalits) have begun to shake the foundations of India's social order. They think in ways their ancestors never could have imagined. More of them are following Christ than at any other time in India's history, ministry leaders told CT [Christianity Today].

India's church has grown and is getting larger. It now comprises over 70 million members, according to Operation World. That makes it the eighth largest Christian population in the world, just behind the Philippines and Nigeria, bigger than Germany and Ethiopia, and twice the size of the United Kingdom.

Over seventy million . . . but how much over? More figures:

Across the vast nation, a visitor hears of unprecedented numbers of people turning to Christ. Operation Mobilization, one of India's largest missionary groups, has grown to include 3,000 congregations in India, up from 300 in less than a decade.

A hospital-based ministry in north India has seen 8,000 baptisms over the past five years after a decade of only a handful. Operation World's detailed statistics show that the Indian church is growing at a rate three times that of India's Hindu population.

The 2001 Indian census placed Christians at just over 2 percent of India's population. But currently, Operation World puts the figure near 6 percent and notes that "Christian researchers in India indicate much higher results, even up to 9 percent." Many Indian Christians say that doors closed for centuries are swinging open.

That all sounds rather impressive and fast-moving . . . but some caution is in order:

No one can be certain of such trends in this vast and complicated country. Religion statistics are poor, and enthusiastic reports from mission organizations may reflect only local conditions.

Todd Johnson, director of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Center for the Study of Global Christianity, says he has opted for more conservative estimates than Operation World's. The center's Atlas of Global Christianity estimates 58 million Indian Christians, not 70 million. Most of the difference lies in Operation World's "unaffiliated" category. The unaffiliated may be part of independent fellowships, or be "insider" Hindu or Muslim followers of Christ.

Nearly all reports of rapid growth come from independent mission and church groups. "I'm waiting to see how they settle," says Johnson. "It's a very volatile situation. Exciting things are happening. That's real. Our methodology is to wait and see, and do our best to track it. But it is remarkable. Everybody agrees with that. It is something new in the last ten years, especially in the north."

While the figures are debatable, the rise in numbers of conversion seems clear, so the question is "Why?" The article goes into some detail on this, but three points that struck me indicates that Christianity in India is associated with the vision of a fairer society: education, democracy, and equality. The article connects this to the so-called "social gospel":

Western Christians shy away from social programs. They take for granted the possibility of economic progress and think it has little to do with faith. In India, however, such programs make the full implications of Christian faith visible.

While this quote doesn't explicitly develop the point, I think that we can suggest that people at the bottom of Indian society probably see Christianity as a means of social mobility and convert partly for that reason.

Does that make such conversions 'genuine'? Interesting question. Read the article.

Terrorism's 'Brute Cause'?

The Washington Post

I don't want to be one of those joining in the chorus clamoring against Ezra Klein for speculating on the root causes to Faisal Shahzad's attempt at terrorism, but we can at least examine what Klein said in a May 4th column titled "The economic crisis meets terrorism":

Annie Lowrey catches something unexpected: The arrested subject of last weekend’s Times Square bomb plot is a homeowner in the midst of foreclosure. Here's MSNBC:

[Faisal Shahzad] defaulted on a $200,000 mortgage on his Connecticut home and the Shelton property is now in foreclosure, according to court records. The foreclosure records show Faisal Shahzad took out the mortgage in 2004, and that he co-owned the home with a woman named Huma Mian. Chase Home Finance LLC sued Shahzad, 30, in September to force the foreclosure. The case is pending in Milford Superior Court.

This guy is like string theory for the media: He brings together the seemingly incompatible stories that drove the past decade. That said, you of course don't want to speculate on why someone "really" did something. The hearts of men are opaque, and motives are complex. But it's a reminder that foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don't make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we've done to save the financial sector, we've not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.

Klein is being cagy, careful not to say the wrong thing on the root causes of terrorism, but he does seem to be tracing, if obscurely, a line from foreclosure to terrorism in Shahzad's case. This line, however, only connects things if one holds the usually unarticulated assumption that Islam is a religion intrinsically more susceptible to violence on the part of its adherents. In fact, a lot of people appear to think this about Islam, including very many Muslims themselves since we're often warned by Muslim spokesmen that depictions of their prophet, for instance, will result in violent outbursts by Muslims around the world, violence that these same spokesmen can do nothing to forestall.

Call this the assumption of terrorism's 'brute cause': Islam.

But while Islam is certainly a factor, given the overwhelming fact of so many Islamist terrorists, not every Muslim turns to terrorism -- in fact, most do not. Obviously, other factors play a role, perhaps even a foreclosure on one's home.

But I doubt that foreclosure is the significant factor in Shahzad's case. Rather, I suspect that Pakistan's long-standing identity crisis as a Muslim state carved out of a larger 'infidel' state is the significant factor. Pakistan has gravitated over the years toward an Islamist identity supported by the army to encourage animosity toward India and use jihadist ideology to motivate Pakistanis against Hindu India, a policy Fareed Zakaria reminds us of in a recent Newsweek column, "Terrorism's Supermarket" (May 17, 2010):

[F]rom its founding, the Pakistani government has supported and encouraged jihadi groups, creating an atmosphere that has allowed them to flourish . . . . [T]he government's jihadist connections go back to the country's creation as an ideological, Islamic state and the decision by successive governments to use jihad both to gain domestic support and to hurt its perennial rival, India.

The dictatorships of prior years in Pakistan have subsidized radical Islam and allowed it to set up thousands of madrassas and dominate the field of education there. The resulting radicalization many young Pakistanis should therefore hardly be surprising. This sort of thing, rather than the brute fact of Islam alone, accounts for the specter of Islamist terrorism that confronts the world.

Or so it seems to me from where I sit . . .

Robert D. Kaplan: "Revenge of Geography"

Geopolitics

Illustration by Aaron Goodman

(Image from Foreign Policy)

Robert Kaplan has an excellent (though disputed) article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy (May/June 2009): "The Revenge of Geography." Although his article is global in scope, emphasizing the role played by geography in conflicts along what he calls "shatter zones" (reminiscent of Huntington's "fault lines" between civilizations, except geographic rather than religious), it has some especially significant observations about the specific case of Pakistan:

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups -- Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns -- for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan's raison d'être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

To the west, the crags and canyons of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan.

The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan. Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U.S.-led forces -- and of India, whose own destiny and borders are hostage to what plays out in the vicinity of the 20,000-foot wall of the Hindu Kush.

Geography, ethnicity, and religion -- a witches' brew that makes up the dysfunctional state that we know as Pakistan. We're rather far from Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man, which saw human history as a struggle between ideologies that had reached its Hegelian goal of liberal democracy. But we're also not precisely in those civilizations where Samuel P. Huntington placed us, either, for the Islamic civilization that ought to glue Pakistan together is a rather weak binding agent, given the corrosive acid of ethnicity. The good news in what Kaplan shows is that the Taliban, being an expression of Pashtun nationalism, will encounter resistance from the Punjabis who rule Pakistan and wouldn't want their nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of a different ethnic group. We can therefore expect the Pakistan army to show more resistance than it previously did, for the stakes have been raised by the Taliban's push beyond the Swat Valley.

Or can we? Another scholar, Thomas Barfield, raises some doubts, noting the rise of Islamic radicalism within Pakistan's heavily Pashtun Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its previously secular army:

A lot of people in the ISI are Pashtuns because they had the language skills. During the Soviet War period, [Mohammad] Zia ul-Haq began Islamizing the army. Before, the army was fairly resolutely secular, but since the '80s you saw a greater and greater influence of Islamists in the army as well as the ISI. By the time they were helping the Taliban, some [army officials] were highly sympathetic to this idea of a Wahhabi-style Islamic state. Pakistan was formed as a state for Muslims separated off from India -- its name means "land of the religiously pure" -- and it's always been like, "Well, are we Muslim enough?" (Michael Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve Altogether? (Interview with Thomas Barfield)" Mother Jones, May/June 2009)

Barfield worries not just about a Pashtun attempt to take over Pakistan but also about even a failed Pastun attempt to grab the entire country if Pakistan's army holds steady and manages to keep the Punjab region for itself in the ensuing chaos:

The army has always stood to prevent that [sort of takeover], so presumably if they would hold on to the army, the army would hold on to Punjab and prevent things from getting out of hand. But then the question would be, if it starts to fall apart like that, would India feel the need to make a preemptive strike to go after the nukes? (Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve")

This is where things get really scary . . . and even scarier is the recognition that the world is full of 'Pakistans'! Perhaps not nuclear-armed ones, but increasingly militarized "shatter zones" destabilized by the tyranny of geography.

I have seen the future, and it is murder.

UPDATE: Commentor John B. (below) links to a strong and informed rebuttal of Kaplan at the Registan blog.