by Vivek Menezes

There’s something deeply rotten about the way the international cultural phenomenon known as Modernism is studied, everywhere in the world. And everyone in the know realizes that we are fast approaching a tipping point that will entirely upturn the global narrative.

This has been an international problem for a long time, because the subject has usually been addressed with different parts of the globe kept conceptually distinct from each other for no good reason. And it is also a huge problem for the subcontinent, where a similar problem has persisted – scholars focus on the Bengal Renaissance to the maddening exclusion of everything else. But in all of this, both in India and the West, there is a curious and sustained reluctance to reckon with the very obvious evidence as it exists, a widespread phenomenon I have no hesitation as characterizing as both stubborn and lazy.

This is because the evidence to challenge most prevailing assumptions is extraordinarily copious, and literally wherever you want to look, so that it obviously requires a certain wilfullness to ignore it. This issue has caused me considerable anger and sorrow over the years, as I have become steadily involved without ever intending to do so. This Monday piece for 3QD is an unusually personal account of an art historical conundrum which I stumbled on with no idea of what was coming. It still wound up turning my life upside down.

[E]very Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to do otherwise.” Holland Cotter, New York Times 2008

Around twenty years ago, I spent about 18 months working from Bombay on assignment from Equipe Cousteau in Paris. In my very early 20’s, it was a reckoning with my home city on my own terms after more than a decade studying in the US, UK and France.

It happened that there were many others like me back home at the same time after years studying abroad – the economy was opening widely, multinational firms had started to recognize India’s growth potential, and we could all see a growing entrepreneurial zeal that was going to pay rich dividends in a fairly short while.

That is exactly what happened. The companies set up in that period include many of India’s best and most successful domestic and international brands, creating massive wealth for their owners. And the party boys whose drinks I once always paid for (Parisian salary!) have become billionaires, one crisp dollar bill fact to keep in mind as we proceed in this unlikely narrative.

But I was never destined to be that kind of rich, and have known it from day one. The focus of my passions has always been different.

Riding out by mere bicycle in the late evening cool from my office at Wellington Mews in Colaba, I developed a habit of going to the art galleries of the city for an hour or two before their closing time, and became a constant pestering presence who demanded to see every single item in the deepest recess of their collections. And I bought with some assiduousness too.

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by Tom Jacobs

(Apologies to Ernest Hemingway)

It was very late and many people had left the establishment (although many more had arrived to drunkenly bowl and play foosball and Duck hunter). An old man sat in the slight shadows cast by the Skee Ball and Hoop Fever Basketball Arcade machine. In the day time the place was mostly quiet and empty (except for the Power Hour Happy Hour at noon, where you can play an entire hour of video games for $10), but at night the place was flooded with tourists and those who were already drunk and looking for a goofy night out. He was deaf and now at night it was actually quieter than his apartment, which looked out over 42^nd Street, which was so bright and loud (he could feel the vibrations through his bed) that he felt as though he was actually sleeping on the sidewalk. Dave and Buster’s was the quietest bar in the neighborhood, and it was cluttered but clean, and incredibly well-lighted.

The two waiters knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, and that they would never convince him to buy the $8 Potato Skins or the $7 Loaded Queso, much less the $9 Mountain O’ Nachos. So they kept watch on him.

“Last night he, like, tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.

“OMG! Why?”

“Ask him, dude. How should I know? I guess he was in, like, despair.”

“Like, what about?”

“Uh, duh! Nothing.”

“How do you know it was nothing?”

“Because, like, he’s totally loaded. He has heaps of money.”

They stood next to each other at the bar at the back of the place and looked out at the main room, which was surprisingly empty for a Wednesday night, since that was the night of the $15.99 Eat and Play Combo. A security guard walked by holding an intoxicated man in a suit and tie by the back of the neck.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Sixty-five years or so after India’s independence, conflicts that question the idea of a constitutional republic do not show any signs of dying down. A few deservedly get some attention, such as the one in Kashmir. The others, for instance the events in the northeast, hardly get noticed in the rest of India, leave alone the rest of the world. What is common to most of these conflicts is that they are localized along India’s borders where ideas of ethnicity, religion and belonging are contested. There is, however, one such conflict that escapes these categories – the armed struggle against the Indian state by Left-wing guerillas interchangeably termed Maoists or Naxalites.

Till recently the outside world had paid little attention to this conflict which stretches through a large part of the forested belt of central India, a belt also occupied by forest-dwelling tribes subsumed under the label `tribals’. As narratives of an emerging, liberalizing India have lost their novelty, correspondents both foreign and Indian have suddenly discovered a counter-narrative in the Maoists. Unfortunately though, the tribals already badly done in by the Indian state and the Maoists are being used again, as props in stories that show them as noble savages rescued from exploitation by gun-wielding Marxists.

The problem with such a description is not what it says about the Indian state. An incompetent and arrogant minister in-charge of internal security P. Chidambaram, who enjoys the confidence of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and more importantly the leader of the Congress party Sonia Gandhi, has over the past year planned and implemented a campaign against the Maoists. While the Army has been kept out, paramilitary troops, ill-trained and ill-equipped for jungle combat, have been thrown against the Maoists. Easy targets for the guerilla fighters, they have vented fury against local tribals who they believe may be helping the Maoists.

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by Haider Shahbaz

Juicy tomatoes. Crispy lettuce. A succulent chicken breast. Olive oil. Black pepper. Chopped green onions and chopped smelly garlic. Mustard. Rosemary bread, perhaps? Lightly heat the oil. Brown the garlic and the onions as you hear them sizzle. Sprinkle black pepper on one side of the chicken. Sautee the chicken with the pepper side down until a knife cuts it smoothly and exposes the white tender flesh. Smell it. Spread the mustard on slices of rosemary bread. Place the succulent chicken between soft bread with juicy tomatoes and crispy lettuce. Eat.

He imagines tomatoes, chicken, bread. He is hungry. Famished, in fact. Soft, juicy, crispy and succulent: you cannot understand the severity of these adjectives as they orbit his mind. You cannot understand the severity of adjectives. But, let’s stop here. This story is not about food. Not even about poverty or desire. This story is not of love, definitely not bravery. It is not meaningful; it is not meaningless. This story is simply about Muzzamil, who will eat soon. And it is about Dave, who already ate. Still, this story is poor and desirous and brave and loving and meaningful and meaningless in its own peculiar way, like you and I, and our characters and adjectives. And yes, like tomatoes, too.

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Aftermath

Goaded by hurricane the river raged through
on a tear to the sea taking trucks and trees
Oil tanks bobbed under bridges
on swells of liquid gravity
a wood-framed studio pirouetted from its piers
off downstream, a ship of art, rudderless
until it lodged against the steel
lifts of the dam gates
Cellars filled with silt
and whatever the river’d dredged
from back-yard cesspools
from gardens of summer afternoons
from landfills and barns,
leaving earth and offal recollections
along its banks, in basements,
across fields of flattened corn
that had been high enough for its
cobbed yield to have smiled yellow
from white plates until the hurricane
laid it low, tens-of-thousands of stalks
a quashed mat after the pull
of the river’s winnowing rake,
supine as a man after a swift life
lies still before the sweep of the sea
.

by Jim Culleny
9/22/11

by Mara Jebsen

There was a special skull in Paris in the late 1800s. Like all skulls, it once belonged to a larger structure–a display at the Ecole des Beaux Arts offered to young artists studying anatomy. Amongst these is the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke, though struck by the “manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews” and the “complete agreement of the inner organs with one another”, can’t handle the majesty of an entire corpse. He comes to fix his attention uniquely on the skull. He gets hold of it.

Rilke takes the skull back to his student quarters to spend many nights with it. He contemplates it by candlelight, and keeps it company, until, as we’d expect (for its Rilke, Paris, candlelight, skull) he has a strange thought. . .

But first I want to turn your attention to another skull. This one appears in a poem which appeared to me, appropriately enough, in an anthology of Russian poetry : “In the Grip of Strange Thoughts”. The second skull is a photographic reproduction, an X-Ray, of the one inside the actual poet’s head. Its no good– me trying to describe this skull–as Elena Shvarts does it with such stinging radiance that I can hardly describe her powers of description. She writes:

And my God/growing dark/Slipped me this photograph/In which my glowing skull/Etched from the invisible/Swam, blocking out the dusk/And the stripped naked park

She’ll go on in the poem to be bemused, casual, even crude. But in this moment she’s struck and trembling with the oddness of her own skull. She seems to be naming something intrinsically weird. . .

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by Tolu Ogunlesi

The first time I met ‘Kissbaby’, 21, he was a security guard at the Silverbird Galleria in Lagos. I was driving out of the parking lot, and as is standard practice in Lagos, tipped him. Then I became curious. I wanted to know what he did with all the tips he got. What I heard was somewhat surprising. He told me he saved up all his money to pay for recording sessions at music studios.

By the time I meet him again, a few months after the first encounter; he has left his security-guard job. “The salary is too poor; not enough to fulfil my needs… mostly my studio stuff.” That is not all. “The work is not encouraging,” he says. “People always underrate you whenever they see you putting on security uniform.”

But his job is about the only thing that’s changed. The passion for music is still as potent as ever. “As you see me, looking at my appearance, you see music in me. Even if I am not there, my shirt is smelling of music!” he declares. Even the job was meant to be a way of furthering his musical ambitions. “The main reason I decided to work was because of my music, so I’d be able to get money and come out with my album.” His decision to get a job at the Galleria, he says, was influenced by his desire to network, to seek a “connection” that’d advance his budding music career.

The Galleria (a popular hangout for celebrities, and home to one of Lagos’ biggest music stores) is part of the Silverbird Group, which is arguably Nigeria’s largest and most prominent entertainment conglomerate, encompassing radio, television, beauty pageants, and music festivals. “Different types of people always come in… I met them,” he says.

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I
My sister latched the door:
A tube of light through the pane
stunned the cement floor.

My kid brother and I sat
naked near a bucket,
a canister to scoop water

Lifebuoy soap on chipped saucer,
a cylindrical container poised on bricks,
faucet crudely soldered to hem.

Under the container,
nuggets glowed on a charcoal burner
heating up the water.

Let’s be clear about this: No
shower, no tub, no sink, no mirror,
only a hole in the floor

for draining waste bath water out to a gully.
To be fair to bathrooms he had known,
Father had named The Cube.

II
Dizzy and nauseous, heart faster,
beads of sweat on bony chest,
the more I breathed, the more I gasped,

wondering what was taking my sister
so long to scoop water from the bucket
and shower it on my head..

She dragged herself to the door
on tip-toe to reach the latch, fell back,
slowly rose, her fingers clawing the pane.

My kid brother collapsed
on the floor, his mouth an O.
Are we playing dead?

Charcoal, the Mother of All Coals,
Father later said, burns quickly
in airtight rooms, releases deadly gas.

You can’t see, smell, or taste it.
Inhaled, it displaces oxygen
we breathe to stay alive.

I remember only blurs: glass
shattering, treetops waving, sirens,
a cold mask on my face: breathing.

III
Farouk, older brother, waiting
his turn to bathe, sat on a small
crate outside the Cube, reading

Superman, wondered
why no waste water flowed
out to the open gully

in the courtyard. He bolted upstairs
to tell Father, who ran down
without touching the handrail,

broke the glass, unlatched the door,
dragged us all out, and sent Farouk
on his Hero bike to summon Red Cross.

IV
My sister gradually grew
protective of me and my kid brother
who stopped sucking his thumb, after all.

Praised for his presence of mind,
Farouk promised but never gave me his comics
and never lets us forget his heroics.

V
Seeing her three angels in mortal poses,
Mother ripped her blouse,
pummeled her bosom.“ There is no god

but God, no god but God, no god”
The next day, my parents sacrificed
a lamb, gave meat to refugees

camped in Murree
near the Cease Fire Line,
after the first war over Kashmir.

For Farooq

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest writer at 3quarksdaily.

by George Wilkinson

Animals have the remarkable capability of self-maintenance, including healing of and functional recovery from damage. In contrast, inorganic materials are degrade over time and must be repaired or replaced to maintain function.

Self-healing materials are a class of smart materials, inspired by biological systems, which have the ability to repair damage autonomously. This idea occurs frequently in science fiction, from the Terminator to self-healing buildings. In present-day self-healing materials, physical damage alters the local properties of the engineered material, in many cases prompting a chemical reaction which re-forms the material at the site of damage. The promise of this type of material is that they would last longer, because damage could be preemptively and locally healed, preempting secondary damage and restoring the material’s strength. Self-healing would be a useful property in the paint job on a car; in prosthetic joints; or, in the future, on the exterior of spacecraft.

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by Jen Paton

In America we believe in chasing our dreams. Our young people are smart and can do whatever they want to do when they grow up. They should chase their dreams even as our economy falters and youth employment hits its lowest rate since records began (that would be 1948). Even now, especially now, “it’s really important that students have someone there to relate to them … I’m there to guide them to their dream,” says Lauren Berger, aka the “Intern Queen,” who runs an internship listing and advice site. She founded it after completing fifteen unpaid internships during her four years as an undergraduate, convinced she had expert advice to provide aspiring interns. Her book, “All Work and No Pay” comes out next year. Despite the title, I don’t think it’s an anti-internship polemic. Berger is one of legion middlemen who middle class, college educated students can consult to find opportunities to work for little or no pay. At the University of Dreams, one can pay upwards of $8000 for a summer internship – inclusive of college credit and housing.

To the growing subset of overeducated, under-or-unemployed wannabe white-collar workers, for those of us who can afford it or finagle a loan, working for free has become normal. The internship is understood as a way to gain experience in your chosen field or even just to figure out what you want to do. The London University where I took my MA hosted a panel discussion for those interested in media and arts careers (I realize this is already, sadly, a questionable premise). The panel featured young and youngish professionals in museums, television, and PR, describing how they go their start and how “we” – mostly BA students, but some MAers like myself, might think about building ours. All agreed that the unpaid internship was fundamental.

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by James McGirk

As I approach my fifteenth year living in the United States, I thought I ought peek under the hood and scrape some of the gunk off my filters to see how much distortion and prejudice has crept in between my ears. Marco Polo, patron saint of expatriate literature provides an excellent experimental model for doing so. Polo didn’t write his account of his 24-years exploring on behalf of the Kublai Kahn, Travels of Marco Polo; technically he dictated it to Rustichello de Pisa, three years after returning to Italy, while imprisoned in a Genoese prison.

Before Rustichello put his quill in Marco Polo’s inkwell, Polo just seemed like an old crank. One of those old traveler types who recounts ribald stories in exchange for food and drink; to his incredulous neighbors he was a merchant who had set out on an errand for a foreign sovereign and returned home twenty-four years later without much to show for it beyond some very strange stories. It wasn’t until he was captured by the Genoese and thrown in jail with a romance author were his stories documented and eventually published. The story goes that Marco Polo dictated his travels to Rustichello de Pisa out of sheer boredom. Although one does wonder whether the forced encounter between Polo and his amanuensis was entirely coincidental.

Even after dozens of folios and translations, Travels of Marco Polo retains the rolling rhythm of memories recounted out loud. Polo describes city after city, first outlining demographics and key economic details before meandering into anecdote. I thought I should go through the cities I had lived in the United States and, without doing any research whatsoever, I would describe the cities as if I were imprisoned in Genoa, and forced to affect Marco Polo’s style. I will begin my journey in Colorado as I did long ago:

The Mountain City of Boulder

Let me begin in the small mountain state of Colorado, in the city of Boulder, a city of some 60,000 souls laying approximately a day’s journey from the great aerodrome of Denver International Airport. Boulder is subject to the President of the United States of America, and its inhabitants worship myriad gods and goddesses, though most accept Jesus Christ as their lord. The city rests at the base of a great cliff, in the foothills the Rocky Mountains, the tallest and most forbidding of mountain ranges in the United States of America, though its highest peaks are dwarfed by the Himalayas.

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by Hasan Altaf

Looking back, I'm not sure how I got through my entire education, studying literature and writing, without ever really reading Greek drama; there was of course Shakespeare; Chaucer, at one point; I even have a vague memory of the Jataka tales, but no teacher or professor ever had me read or think about Greek tragedy. The stories we all knew, of course – Oedipus, Troy, Heracles, capricious deities – but we never actually read the material.

This did not strike me as a problem. Most people, after all, get through life just fine without Greek tragedy, and in any case it is hard to imagine literature more ancient and more removed from us; its relevance seemed questionable. A friend, however, recommend the poet Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse that recreates the story of Geryon (in the myth, a many-headed monster Heracles kills to steal his cattle – one of the labors; in Carson's hands, an awkward, lonely child growing up), and I liked Carson's work, so I picked up another book of hers, Grief Lessons. Mostly I just liked the title, but it turned out to be a translation of four plays by Euripides. The book sat on my bookshelf for years, moving from Baltimore to Pakistan to DC, until I finally got around to it. Since then I have been oddly hooked; when you find yourself looking forward to comparing two translations of Sophocles' Elektra, you know something has gotten to you.

I am, obviously, no expert in this material; my knowledge of ancient Greece is essentially limited to what I remember of the myths and what Wikipedia tells me (among other things, that Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, was famous for her boots).

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by Maniza Naqvi

“I mean they’re what— all of nineteen or twenty at most? And when push comes to shove they are going to get hurt around here aren’t they? Occupy Wall Street? Taking on the police—and for what–where will this go?”

“What do you mean for what–what do you mean where will this go?” Brian looks at me in irritation.

“What are they asking for Brian?” I shout over the sloganeering and the police helicopters over head. It’s Friday late afternoon and I look at all the young people barely out of their childhood—now sitting down in the courtyard of the Police Headquarters—with their big cardboard hand made signs around them saying, “Occupy Everything,” and shouting, “We are the 99%.”

“Can’t you read the signs? They’re protesting Wall Street. They want to change the system.” Brian replies. “And that’s important.”

“So why are they protesting at the Police Headquarters—why not at 200 West Street at Goldman Sach’s headquarters? Why protest against police brutality—why not Goldman Sach’s brutality? I mean I agree with Mayor Bloomberg—these guys are doing their job and their being paid only US$30-50,000 a year. I mean the cops are part of the 99% as well! Aren't they? They are on the opposite side of the barricades but they are on the same side aren't they? They face the same issues don't they?”

“That’s not the point!”

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