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Cenacle - In hidden crypts and dark vaults, cenacles of secret religion meet to keep their flame alive.

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Cenacle - November 2006

Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad by Matthew Levitt

November 30th 2006 07:08

Hamas by Matthew Levitt

Matthew Levitt comes with an impressive resume. He is a fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy nad has served as an FBI analyst specialising "specializing in tactical and strategic analysis in support of counterterrorism operations." Hir recent book is called Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad.

The book describes in detail how Hamas was created and how it went on to become a dominant political force in Palestinian politics. People are often confounded by the fact that Hamas at once seems to be a both a religious charitable organization and a terrorism group at the same time. Hamas has often exploited this ambiguity in the perception of it status.

Levitt shows how its charitable activities actually enable Hamas to organise and carry out terrorism. Central to this structure is a program called dawa. Dawa means using charity and welfare as a proselytizing tool in Islam. But, Hamas uses its dawa program to finance terrorism. As quoted in the book, Hamas distributed $2-$3 million dollars anually in 2001 in monthly handouts to Palestinian terrorists. A family of a suicide bomber can get upto 500-50,00 dollars payment and a monthly $100 stipend. But, apart from directly remitting payments for suicide bombings, Hamas dawa actually allows it to reach and recruit its suicide bombers.

Leviit on Hamas

The book records in detail how Hamas has radicalised Palestinian society, how it obtains foreign funding and the nitty gritty of its financial operations. It does not focus so much on the activities themselves as on the logistics carrying them out.

Levitt writes a factual book which collects and collates a wide number of sources, omitting tendentious opinion to the minimum. I personally cannot comment on the authenticity of these facts but as a reader eager to know more about terrorism myself, I found the book an easy, accesible entry to understanding one of the most diabolical heads of this multi-headed hydra. Its not topheavy with figures and stats(something that always loses my attention) and is designed to be understood by a popular audience.

Levitt devotes one small chapter to whether Hamas is a threat to the West. Two years ago, I saw on telivision a Hamas activist saying that their battle was not with America but with Israel and they will be content with that battle. A couple of days ago, senior Hamas figures has issued disturbing Anti-American warnings. I wondered at the change in confidence and style and the shift in its own perception of its ambitions.

When it won the Palestinian elections, I was not as much opposed to it as the mainstream opinion. After all, there should be an alternative to the so-called secular party of Arafat and Abbas and I understood Hamas to be an inevitable reactionary Islamic response to the domination of Palestinian politics by PLO. But my opinion has changed as Hamas went on to morph from a rightist party albeit an ultra-right one of a local Palestinian situation to an armed wing of global Islamist movement.

Read Levitt. A highly useful book in understanding Hamas and Islamic terrorism in general.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Non-Fiction

   

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Fake Classics

November 29th 2006 06:08

What exactly is a classic? What is the difference between a true classic and made up ones? I can telll if a book is a bad one or good one but how do you determine whether it's a classic or not? And if you read a book that is awful but demonstrably a classic, how do you react to it? Can we disagree that it's not a classic? Here are some classics which I do not think fit the label at all. It's just a random selection.

5: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE: OK. The book is not bad. The story has some punch but is written in a flat style. Some of my friends have said that the movie is infinitely better but I haven't seen the movie. But as a standalone, the book is just boring.

4: CATCHER IN THE RYE BY J.D.SALINGER: Now this one is not only a not-classic but one of the worst books I ever had the misfortune to read. And I don't get it. Neither what the novel is or why it should garner so much adulation.

3: ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE: This novel reguarly tops the best novels of the century polls. It's not just a classic. It is supposed to be one of the finest achievements of modern literature if not the finest. The long and pondering wordfest which happens in a day and takes place in Dublin. It's not that it is badly written. It is well-written in parts but Joyce is in so love with his own style that he does not make any concessions for the reader. But, even if you put all the effort into it you are not sure what you have got at the end. There are hundreds of wonderful book out there. I don't want to scratch it out of the Classics list yet, only wish to see it removed from the No.1 position.

2: MADAME BOVARY BY GUASTAVE FALUBERT: If Ulyssses is supposed the greatest book of the twentieth century, this is supposed to be the greatest book of the nineteenth. I personally think the initial reaction to the book was from the vulgraity trial it had to meet and once the victimhood had been conferred on it, it was elevated from the drab to the heavenly. It is supposed to have initiated realism into art scene but reading now the story is cloying and overly sentimental. It is also written badly. Not in the same league of Stendhal and Hugo. If there is a revision of criticism that yanks down something from a lofty pedestal, Madame Bovary is the first one to desrve it.

1: WAR AND PEACE BY LEO TOLSTOY: I have come across people calling it the greatest book in world literature. Is it? The war scenes are good. But when Tolstoy goes on and on about upperclass vagaries, one longs to say, SHUT UP! An excess of self-indulgence mars what could have been a good novel.

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Hero: A beautiful movie with a rotten message

November 28th 2006 10:13

Hero

What do you do when you find a beautiful work of art with a rotten message at its core? Should you try to be balanced and detach the art part of the thing from its message? Or be repelled even more to see such effort going into the promotion of indigestible pablum?

I faced the same dilemma when I saw Hero. First, of all I don't like Matrix type of wire stunts and I do not like the so-called martial arts movies where the guys are cartwheeling in thin air. Hero serves up both these things with a ballerina kind of pretentiousness. I was put off by the whole thing. Except it's written well and technically one of the best plots I've seen in movies.

There is a Chin Emperor of China, who is bent on unifying the fragmented China at any cost. This puts him at odds with the smaller feudalities particularly the Zhaos. Three deadly assassins have sworn to kill him and they nearly succeeded too. As a result, our king doesn't let anyone nearer than 100 feet of his person and leads a lonely life.

The movie starts when a small local warrior called Nameless is brought to the city because he has killed all the three warriors. The king is curious to know how this happened and with every tale the warrior is granted an audience with His Majesty that is much nearer. Nameless tells him three stories and reached within ten feet of the King. Till now, the movie is a yawn but it suddenly turns when the king comes with a riposte. He doesn't buy the tales of Nameless and gives his own alternative version. Nameless is impressed but the king makes some mistakes and he rectifies them in yet another retelling of what happened. This criss-crossing of narrative is a brilliant strategy and holds you attention like a charm.

It now transpires that Nameless actually wanted to kill the King and has mastered a skill whereby he can kill him within ten feet, To get to that proximity, he beseeches co-operation from the other three assassins. Two agree to help him, even become ready to die to buy the audience for Nameless. One disagrees and says that the king shouldn't be killed.

It is this defection that causes a lot of friction in the story. The assassin who doesn't want to kill the king writes a calligraphic syllable for Nameless. Our Land, it says. No matter how cruel the king is he shouldn't be killed because he's trying to unite China.

It's now become painfully clear that this is a well-mounted, beautifully made propaganda piece about Taiwan. It both wags a finger at wider world not to interfere in China's "internal problems" and fantasises about the breakaway rebels laying down their arms as well. The makers are not unaware of the cost of this unification. If Zhao has to be taken in the consolidated empire, rivers of blodd have to flow. And yet, that's necessary because it banishes the artifical boundaries of the world. The King doesn't want to stop at unifying just the six fragments of China; he wants to abolish the borders of the rest of the world too and achieve One world.

As for my original question, my choice is clear. No matter how beautiful the film, one cannot accept this blatant, bloodthirsty warning from the idealogical zealots.

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The World of Wonders by Robertson Davies

November 26th 2006 06:30

World of Wonders by Robinson Davies

The World of Wonders is the last novel of the Deptford trilogy. In it, the BBC is making a movie on Houdini and has Magnus Eisengrim, who is a renowned magician himself, recreate Houdini's contraptions. Ramsay hangs out on the sets and by the by, is asked by the production team to keep the production historically accurate. One day they all sit down and ask Magnus about his past.

In several spaced conversations Magnus recounts his life. He was born a premature baby, when his mother is hit on her head with a snowball with a rock hidden in it. Life was hard in the small Canadian town with a mad mother. One day, he is kidnapped by a circus show freak and sexually abused by his kidnapper for the next few years. Magnus has no compunction in telling them that he had done everything to hasten the death of his kidnapper.

The scene next moves to London and Magnus describes he learnt the basics of show business and later, moves to Switzerland where Magnus learns intricacies of watch making. Both these arts help to make him a magician. In Switzerland, he meets also meets Liesl, his life long mistress and manager.

Dunstable keeps close to the conversation because he wants to know Magnus's own version of what happend on the night of Staunton's death. Magnus has more than one agenda and the novel provides for a very entertaining clash of egos.

This novel comes a close second to The Manticore and it has the most explicit statement of Davies' work. Quoting Spengler, Davies tells about a Magian world view, a weltanshauung where, " a sense of unfathomable wonder of the invisible existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty of day-to-day demands of the tangible world."

Davies' lifelong attempt is to find a way to retain the old magic, fairytales, myths and miracles, that was banished by the advancement of science. His interesting protagonists of the three novels of this trilogy, Dunstable, David and Magnus, all battle with that Magian world view and each comes to accept it in his own way.

For Davies though, the Magian world view provides an alternative to his rejection of modernity. In the Deptford trilogy, this rejection does not descend into a monomania resembling hatred, as it does in the Cornish trilogy.

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The Manticore by Robertson Davies

November 25th 2006 06:06

The Manticore by Robertson Davies

The Manticore starts where Fifth Business left off. Staunton was found dead in his car, with a big stone in his mouth. Police and Dunstable Ramsay are less than happy with Magnus's explanation but they can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, a mild crisis is provoked when Staunton's son David shouts that Magnus is a murdererer during one of his performances.

David is the hero of the novel and he begins by telling us the comedy around Staunton's funeral. But, once he loses control in that auditorium, David realises that he needs therapy and goes to Switzerland, for a treatment of Jungian analysis.

David is told by his analyst to keep a diary and it is these long sessions with his beautiful therapist that form the crux of the novel. As David goes back and forth about his life, his tense relationship with his dad, his lifelong chastity come to the fore. This is also simultaneously cast in a Jungian mould and we see an interesting man wrestling with his own demons.After the treatment, David meets the menage a trois of Dunstable Ramsay, his old schoolteacher, Magnus Eisengreim, the suspected killer of his father and Liesl, their common mistress.

I think this is the best novel of the series and a very good novel generally. It is also the best case Davies has made of his world view. Just as in Jungian pscychology, we are told to make peace with our Shadow, the other self which we have repressed, Davies wants us to make peace with that old repressed self, the one which believed in magic and wonder, before we crushed it in favour of common rationality.

The man dying with a stone in his mouth is a practice described in Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic. The Manticore is one of the Jungian symbols but it is also a medieval monster that has been imported into Christian myths and folklore from India. These were symbols incorporated into the Western thought in a post-Enlightement phase of heightened Orientalism. Like the predecessors ( Spengler, Jung) he admires so much, Davies too is waging a battle against what's left of Enlightenment in the West.

As I have said previously, Davies preserves his mask successfully and so he can argue for this viewpoint without producing a backlash from our rational self. In his other works, the mask slips off and Davies comes across as a man possesed with more invective and animus against science and modernity than is apparent in this novel.

The Manticore is probably his best-modulated and best-written work and that is why, it is a pleasure to read and recommend.

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Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

November 24th 2006 05:33

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

Roberston Davies was nominated for Bookers prize exactly once in his long career and he did not win but he is routinely selected to the sundry "my favorite author or book" lists more than any other Booker winner. He has produced many novels and many volumes of criticism but his Deptford trilogy is supposed to be his best work.

I read the trilogy in reverse which meant that the first novel is what I read last. Inevitably, since I already knew what happened later, Fifth Business seemed kind of stale to me. But it is in this novel that the main conflict is set, which Davies re-visits again from different perspectives in the other two novels.

The main protagonists are Dunstable Ramsay, a school teacher who is the narrator of Fifth Business, Boy Staunton, his lifelong enemy and friend, Magnus Eisengriem, a charismatic magician and Liesl, the mistress they share in common.

When Dunstable is 10 years old, he and Staunton have a quarrel one day which ends up in Staunton thowing a snowball at him with a stone hidden in it. The snowball hits the head of Mary Dempster, a pregnant wife of a minister, causing her son Paul to be born prematurely. It is this event that provides the hook for all their lives.

Ramsay is filled with contrition at this event for Mary slowly descends into madness. He holds a soft spot for her lifelong and comes to think of her as a saint during his World War experience; something which leads him to study saints professionally. He becomes a schoolmaster and ends up teaching Staunton's own son. Staunton meanwhile has become a very rich man and most of the novel is a sort of Kane and Abel kind of showdown between them, though it is always told from Ramsay's perspective.

The mood darkens when a charismatic magician called Magnus enters the scene. It is not long before that Ramsay realises that Magnus is Paul Dempster, the lost son of his patron saint. But he is supicious that Magnus harbours some malevolent project and the novel ends with the suggestion of Boy Staunton's imminent murder. This strange murder underpins the later two novels; Ramsay is sure that Magnus has had a hand in it while Magnus is non-commital.

It is clear that Fifth Business is just an introductory preamble for the other two novels and this was especially clear to me because I had read the other two. And it didn't help that both The Manticore and World of Wonders had more rivetting action packed in them and more juicy detail too.

It is frequently said that you can read these three novels in any order but its better to read Fifth Business first, or else it would be spoiled for you, like it was for me.

The whole trilogy is filled with obscure but fascinating details of Bollandists and operattas of post-War England, made all the more enjoyable because Davies hits a pitch perfect narrative voice in this series; something he failed to repeat ever again.

For a work which is modelled on Jungian pscyhology, I must say that Davies manages to preserve the mask of a cultivated man of culture with a sophisticated sense of humour who just barely dissents with the mainstream thought quiet well in this trilogy. When it slips off as in his Cornish trilogy, the results are diagreeable.

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Contact by Carl Sagan

November 23rd 2006 09:09

Probably, Carl Sagan was himself a bit doubtful whether what he wrote counts as a novel, so he's added A Novel to Contact, to remind people that his book is supposed to be a novel. Sagan had that popular glamour some science boys seem to acquire and this rubs off on the novel. Otherwise there is plenty little to recommend.

Contact by Carl Sagan

A female astronomer recognizes a signal coming from Vega, the closest star system to earth. This could be the extra-terrestrial signal they were all looking for and it takes ages to decode it but once done, it appears that the aliens want us to build a machine to go visit them and they have sent us the instructions.

The novel details the global hullabaloo that rises over this news and the long painful process of constructing the machine. The woman has male rivals of course and she will be bypassed at every step of the way. But once the offending rival is cleared out of the way by a religious maniac, it is our heroine’s chance to plunge in.

Sagan can’t plot and there are probably as much twists and turns in this novel as there are in a pitchfork. It is at best a quasi-realist speculation on what might happen in the world if we received anything as like SETI. But, once the plunge is made and the heroine steps onto the machine, the novel even ceases to be that. It becomes an elaborate and rather silly epistemological trap for faith issues just as the whole SETI thing might be an elaborate aand rather silly hoax.

I read this novel after I saw the movie and one can only wonder at the pruning job the scriptwriters did. Strictly avoidable.

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The Iranian Whore and the Population Anxieties of the Modern world

November 22nd 2006 05:37

I have been writing about population fears in the ancient world. Here's an article that's been doing the rounds of conservative blogs all around that focuses on the rise of prostitution in Iran and the consequent death of Iran itself. Go read the entire article, it's worth your time.

Prostitution, for the author, is the symbol of a society in decline. The article tries to analyse what this means in the Islamic context but also uses a general view of population anxiety to bolster the case.

First, the import of widespread prostitution:

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

Therefore:

To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.


There are many interesting allusions from history and even the relationship to literature. Why is it that a prostitute has been singled out as a symbol for decline of the people?


What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.

And now for the application of this theory to Iranian example:

Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook.


And now Spengler comes to an especailly relevant section for our blog, for we have been trying to track just such anixieties in world literature:


The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...

The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.

Curiously enough this links to Islamism even though all over the world, whether in India or in Europe, th rates of Muslim growth are a matter of anxiety. it is perhaps ironical that Mulsims everywhere should be flourishing but Iran be the odd man out:

That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life.

And back to the prostitution and tying up both the concepts:

Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.

When Soviet Russia fell, the Russian prostitute became a common symbol of the Brotherhood, to imply how capitalism has taken this once proud country to the dogs. Remember Dirty But Clean's Ludmilla's Broken English. Will the brotherhood so rise up and use the Iranian prostitute to depict Iran's descent into fascist totalitarianism?

You can read my other post here.

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The Syrian Goddess by Lucian of Samosata

November 20th 2006 04:29

Astrate Source: Sacred Texts

The tract called The Syrian Goddess is usually attributed to Lucian even though it is written in a different dialect than the one Lucian normally wrote in. No matter who wrote it, the tract remains our major source for understanding Near Eastern religion in classical times. It is also very important for understanding something about the nature of religion itself.

Lucian here describes his visit to Hierapolis where stood the great temple of Dea Syria, one of the great Mother Goddesses of the ancient times. The pantheon included Rhea, Cybele, Isis and Ishtar. Distinct from all of them was Atargatis and she had her major temple at Hierapolis and was known to Hellenic world as Dea Syria.

Lucian is an astute observer; he remains disturbed by some of the “miracles” he saw but his overall outlook is unfazed by them. If he has not understood something, he has not understood something. He is not overly mystified nor does he reject anything too quickly.
The tract describes all the exotic rituals and the phallic embellishments in detail.

Two things however stand out. One was the coterie of worshippers around the Great Goddess called galli. They were men who in a ritual frenzy emasculated themselves and then lived as chaste womanly worshippers of the Goddess. From curetes to corybants, almost all the major Goddesses had them but there are differences in the classes of worshippers. Lucian describes how galli were initiated and lived and these form the most interesting passages of his book.

The other practice that this particular temple was famous for was sacred prostitution. This too was practiced at other centres but this temple was well-known for it. On a ritual day, women even from well-to-do families would wait on the streets to be taken by foreign men and foreign men only. I wondered and still wonder how those women were treated after that day of joy.

Such practices were matters of immense spiritual and political controversy merely because the ancient world and the Near East in particular were being swept away in a tide of patriarchal religions including the then nascent Christianity. No wonder when it gained ascendancy, Christianity directed its ire against such pagan religions first.

For centuries, Lucian’s account was the only one available about this important stage of religious evolution but once archaeology unearthed near east civilizations, it was discovered that these practices went back for thousands of years. When you read Lucian’s tract, you get the felling that the worship though strong did not preserve the memories of its own traditions intact. In fact, it makes you realize how vulnerable these religions were to an attack by a young vigorous faith.

This book is available online, if you prefer it that way. Reading a straight out history like this is perhaps much better than reading ten fantasies and it gives you a high fed on strangeness and mysticism. No matter how skeptical you might be, it still can move you to the core as it did to me.

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The Disappearance of Odile by Georges Simenon

November 17th 2006 07:23

Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon has a huge cult following for his Inspector Maigret series and has made a huge impact on French cinema. Around thirty of his novels have been made into movies.

I have read around 15 to 20 Simenon novels myself. I don't like Maigret and sometimes the Maigret novels can get too wishy washy and I stopped reading them after I read one particularly pitiful example. Nevertheless, there is one novel of Simenon which I prize as one of the most effective novels written on teenage angst ever.

The Disappearance of Odile is about Odile, a teenager who runs away from home with the vague notion of a suicide. She comes from a dysfunctional family and her parents couldn't care less. It is her elder brother who is studying sociology in colleger who starts searching for her. The novel mostly describes the young man's rookie search for his sister.

It is interesting that today we almost club American together with the words "dysfunctional family" whereas a century ago, the French were being excoriated for it. It actually shows the middle-class and upper-class bashing by the stiff lip liberals. This was going on in every country, in France, in Russia at the turn of the century. Before any nomads ruled a town they captured, they first erased the older inhabitants. It is clear then that if a liberal state has to erected then the resisting classes have to dehumanised.

After a century of relentless dehumanisation by its artists who paved the way for the revolutionaries, every society had fallen and given in, except of course America. Curiously, America was a newcomer to this treatment and as it fell to America to halt the onward march of our brothers, America recieved this treatment in spades. It is worth noting that Simenon modeled his detective in explicit contra-distinction to the American detective prototype (ya know the cigar chewing, foul mouthed, gun-happy, moralistic Humphrey Bogart types).

Simenon's novels then, most of them anyway are an attempt to simlutaneously dehumanise the upper classes and sympathising or understanding "society's rejects". Usual libaloney. I gave up reading him when he pressed on with this agenda at the expense of readabilit and his unique style of writing had no more surprises for me.

Unlike his other novels though, Simenon prevents this from becoming another bourgeoise-bashing novel by working in the perimeters of his theme. Simenon has this unique ability to convey vast pscychological truth through simple means and his technique comes in handy in this novel.

It tears open the mind of a teenager who is beset with bordeom, has nothing to do in life and wants to commit suicide. There are many like that and we can palpably touch the inside of such a brain. Sad for the most part, it ends on a hopeful note. A necessary read.

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The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

November 16th 2006 06:47

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

I won't presume to dissect what lies behind the runaway success of The Da Vinci Code but it launched a certain kind of thriller and made it a cottage industry and that's our concern. This thriller takes up a work of art or a religious icon and weaves its intrigue around it. According to some, it is an indication to take Western culture seriously. According to others, it is symbolic of decreasing imagination.

I myself wrote that "the extraordinary success of these novels might be indicative of the fact that we are out of Cold War and farther and farther from it. No longer under threat of nuclear destruction, we want our heroes not to stop bombs in the hands of rogue nations but find a missing Caravaggio painting or the Holy Grail and increase our aesthetic education or make us immortal."

I will hold to my view that this is a post-Cold War thriller but there's at least more to it than that, at least to The Da Vinci Code. Curiously, that came across in The Last Templar, another Brown clone. In a revealing moment, that novel says that the fall of Communism was affected not by Ronald Reagan but by Pope John Paul II !

The end of Cold War did away with the Kremlin but the bugbear of all liberals, the Catholic Church, was still there. The communist dictaorship had fallen but the old religion it promised to wipe away was still there and flourishing. Imagine what it must do to the mind of a liberal ! If there were only a secret that could bring down this huge monstrosity, a spiritual government that commands the loyalty of a billion people, why, our hero must find that secret.

The Da Vinci Code is born out of such a conceit. Richard Langdon is again woken up in the middle of his sleep and yanked off this time to Paris, where another bizarre murder has taken place in Louvre. The murdered has pointed to Leonardo da Vinci'd paintings as clues and it is for our symbologist to crack them.

Dan Brown peels away the flab and self-indulgence that marred his Angels and Demons and achieves a highly readable thriller. Only problem is he does not have a convincing villain and if you are a good suspense fiend, you probably can smell the culprit two pages after he is introduced. It also does not help that Brown builds his plot on a very old and a very stale conspiracy theory. But, probably, that's why the novel became such a hit.

You can find my other post on these thrillers here.

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Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

November 15th 2006 06:07

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

After trashing Republicans in his first two novels, Dan Brown turned to another pet target, the Catholic church in his Angels and Demons, the novel which originally introduced his Harvard symbologist hero Robert Langdon. Brown would not become famous until his second Robert Langdon novel The Da Vinci Code became an international blockbuster but looking back it is hard to argue that Angels and Demons is the better novel of the two and his best novel to date.

In the opening scenes, Brown plugs like hell for CERN and probbaly he felt that it was a bit too much, so he plugs a little more in a fatuous prologue. Anyway, a physicist there has been murdered and a graffiti of the Illuminati is written across his chest. Robert Langdon is the professor of symbology and has written a book on the Illuminati, a centuries old secret group which has pledged revenge on the Catholic Church. And a tiny device developed by CERN has been stolen, something to do with anti-matter and stuff, a device which can set a huge controlled explosion.

Elsewhere in the world, the old Pope has kicked the bucket and they are holding elections for the next one. It becomes immediately clear that the anti-matter device is somewhere in the Vatican. Not only all the top contenders for the post of the Pope are going to be killed, one each per hour, each one in a different church. Rome is full of churches, so it difficlut to stop these murders.

This sets up the scavenger hunt, as only Robert can unravel the clues as to where the next murder is going to take place. This is the best portion of the book but dries up a little too soon. A hundred and fifty pages before the end of the novel, the Vatican is in turmoil as these murders come to light and it falls to one man to manage it all and here, Brown loses the plot. The book becomes giddy, overwrought and unsuspenseful.

The legends of the Illuminati which read the same backwards and forwards, recreated here are cool. The action is exicting for the most part too. The good thing about this book is that Brown manages to weave in a lot of his information into a dense plot and both feed off on each other. It also helps that the information is not facile and does not feel like you've read it all somewhere before as in The Da Vinci Code.

Curiously enough, until the other book became a success, nobody noticed this one. But, if part of success is to bring deserving readership to adeserving books, then the wide success of The Da Vinci Code has accomplished at least something good.

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Greatest movie adaptations of literary works

November 13th 2006 06:29

Some of the best adaptations of literary works have happened in India, whose Hindi language film industry is nicknamed as Bollywood. Bollywood routinely picks up movies and novels from around the world and copies them without credit and usually end up mangling them. But, sometimes, just sometimes, they get it and end up doing adapatations that are better than the orginals they are based on. I do not know why. Basically, Hollywood almost always ruins literary adaptations. There is probably something in the methods of Bollywood that suits these works. Anyway, here's my list of 5 outstanding Bollywood movies which were adapted from literary works, that should rank as the best anywhere in the world.

Omkara based on Othello

No.5 OMKARA Vishal Bharadwaj's take on Othello is set in rural UP, where gun-toting gangsters fight with each other for turf control. Bharadwaj's adaptation is very close to the original, differing only in little plot details. Othello might look like a trite story today but this movie manages to convey the sense of fate and evil and tragedy by the end. Awesomely cast, Ajay Devgan is a revelation as Othello whereas Saif Ali Khan was more critically acclaimed for his Iago. Kareen Kapoor makes for a fine Desdemona.

N0. 4 SURAJ KA SATWAN GHODA The title means The Seventh Horse of the Sun, made on a low budget by Shyam Benegal, this movie is a based on a famous Hindi novel of the same name. It tells the story of a single afternoon when a young man relates to his peers stories of three women he had known before. Rajit Kapoor, introduced here, charmingly conveys the tale of a man who has succesfully developed a veneer of humour to mask underlying heartbreak.

Utsav based on Mricchakatika

NO.3 UTSAV. Girish Kannad's movie is based on an ancient Sanskrit play called Mricchakatika. But, Kannad fills his movie with so many extras and have them debate theory of aesthetics that this movie becomes a succesful example of making your adaptation say what the original never said. The movie is narrated by Vatsayana (the man who wrote Kamasutra), here a bumbly sexless man who frequents brothels to note down extravagant sexual acts. The brothel and the courtesan in it are exuberantly celebrated that this movie should put to shame any Moulin Rouge pretenders. The story tells of a courtesan Vasantasena's love for a poor, married brahmin boy called Charudatta. When the king's brother has his eye on Vasanthasena, the stage is set for a dramatic end. Classiest sex comedy ever.

No.2 CHITRALEKHA This Chetan Anand's classic is based on Anatole France's Thaias and is one movie which is perhaps much better than the original. France's story was set in Egypt and the times of nascent Christianity and Anand succesfully shifts it ot Budhist India. The story tells of a king who has fallen so much in love with a courtesan Chitralekha that he forgets all his kingly duties. Time for a monk to enter and confront the offending woman with her sin and duty to the kingdom. Meena Kumari who played the title role is perhaps the greatest tragidienne ever and elevates this drama to a level normally unseen in movies.

Pinjar based on Amrita Pritam's novel

N0.1 PINJAR. The title means Skeleton and this movie was based on Amrita Pritam's novel of the same time. Pritam, an anti-socialist is also the most well-known Punjabi writer. When this movie opened, the English language press in India quickly squelched it because it was made by a right-wing intellectual but this movie is filled with more humanism and sense of reconciliation than a liberal could have ever achieved. An Indian girl is abducted by a Muslim to settle the scores of a family feud, who quickly falls in love with her. Their tortured love story is set around the painful background of the partition of India when nearly 5 million people died. The movie has such a moral edge and raw beauty that I don't think it can ever be topped. An epic if there ever was one.

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Is Western Civilization dying? --II

November 12th 2006 02:04

Call it a divine co-incidence that after writing last post, I should wake up and read this. Thomas Sowell is the most widely read American columnist. t=11/09/2006&page=1" target="_blank">Here he speaks on the death of Western Civilization. Some snippets:

European nations protesting Saddam Hussein's death sentence, as they protested against forcing secrets out of captured terrorists, should tell us all we need to know about the internal degeneration of western society, where so many confuse squeamishness with morality.

Something that I'd wanted to say for a long time:

How many times, in its thousands of years of history, has Europe gone 60 years without a major war, as it has since World War II? That peace has been due to American nuclear weapons, which was all that could deter the Soviet Union's armies from marching right across Europe to the Atlantic Ocean.

This is relevant to my last post:

The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin
found here as if they were peculiarities of the west.

Sowell makes a valid point:

The classic example is slavery, which existed all over the world for thousands of years and yet is incessantly depicted as if it was a peculiarity of Europeans enslaving Africans. Barbary pirates alone brought twice as many enslaved Europeans to North Africa as there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and the American colonies from which it was formed.

How many schools and colleges are going to teach that, going against political correctness and undermining white guilt?

About the above, I have read histories and historical fiction in the past weeks and it gave me the same idea too. That slavery was predominant in every society in the ancient world. Sowell writes:

How many people have any inkling that it was precisely western civilization which eventually turned against slavery and began stamping it out when non-western societies still saw nothing wrong with it?

The surviving West?:
Western nations that show any signs of standing up for self-preservation are rare exceptions. The United States and Israel are the only western nations which have no choice but to rely on self-defense -- and both are demonized, not only by our enemies but also by many in other western nations.

He has a good word for Australia too:

Australia recently told its Muslim population that, if they want to live under Islamic law, then they should leave Australia. That makes three western nations that have not yet completely succumbed to the corrosive and suicidal trends of our times.

And now to the conlcusion:
If and when we all succumb, will the epitaph of western civilization say that we had the power to annihilate our enemies but were so paralyzed by confusion that we ended up being annihilated ourselves?

Isn't that the epitaph of evry civilization that dies?

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Is the Western Civilization dying?

November 11th 2006 07:05

Brad Pitt plays Achilles in Troy

I caught a flash of Troy yesterday when it played on a TV channel. Brad Pitt looked cute and the battle scenes were well-mounted. I couldn't see the whole movie though.

But that brief flash of a movie brought back the memory of a small incident that happened a couple of months back. I wrote something based on Greek mythology and showed it to a friend of mine. He is reasonably well-educated and fairly intelligent but he didn't know anything about Trojan War or Greek mythology. The first time he had heard about them was in the movie Troy!
It turned out I knew a whole lot more about it. I had the whole story of Trojan War as a text for a whole year in school. That alone should make me remember it. My countrymen too should know a bit about Helen of Troy and all that stuff. Of course, I went on to read a lot of literature and philosophy and got to know more about Greeks but my point is, even those who hadn't pursued my interests but came from my background would still know about it. And here was a child of Western Civilization, utterly clueless about his own cultural heritage!

And yesterday when I caught the movie, I marveled at how this Hollywod rehash of an age-old story is the only tenuous link between an age-old civilization and its modern inheritors.
There is a fear floating around in the intellectual circles that Western Civilization is dying. There was this young white man who had no idea whatsover of his own culture, his inheritance.

I also marveled at the irony of it all. In the nineteenth century, at the height of European colonialism, it was white people who would strut over four corners of the world and wake up demons from the past. Whether it was Africa , China or India, it was these people who would reawakened the sense of their cultural heritage. And now a century and a half later, it was I, who had recieved a education which was very much influenced by that colonial experiment, had known something about Western civilization whereas it's own child didn't know anything about it. Isn't it a curious reversal?

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The Departed

November 10th 2006 04:46

Blogging has been light this week. I am in one of those languorous moods when you pick a book and rustle the pages but not much happens.So,I cleared my table of all the books that I'd marked for reading and had half-read.They were weighing oppresively on me. Yep, to write a review here I pick up a book and read it from cover to cover. There were only two or there books which I had read much before I reviewed them here. I have a lot of backlog to cover, many books I had read already, wanted to review but couldn't. Probably, I''do start doing those.

The Departed, dir: Martin Scorcese

That said, let me write something about a movie I have seen this week, The Departed. I like watching movies but am no movie junkie. Which is a way of saying that I have seen but one Martin Scorcese movie before (Casino) and wasn't much impressed by it.

The Departed has got some very good reviews and great feeback from the public. Is it good? Definitely not a masterpiece but is much better than I expected. It's entertaining, to a
degree, if not for an overstretched climax and a poor romantic angle.

The story, adapted from Hong Kong hit Internal Affairs, is about two policemen in Boston, Colin Sullivan and Billy Costigan. Colin has all the right connections, the right credentials and the right demeanour. Billy hails from a family with multiple criminal convictions and has worked his way up with

nothing but a great determination to escape his family's shadow. At an interview for Boston State Police, Colin gets an easy welcome and quickly grows into

one of its star performers. Billy, on the other hand, is given a rotten treatment and is told he can't be a cop.

This class difference is constantly accentuated throughout and provides for a unifying theme of the movie which has two major tracks. Colin in

actuality is a spy erected in the police by the mobster called Frank Costello. Billy, on the hand, is made an undercover cop and sent to infiltrate

Costello's gang, which he does because of his family connections. The movie alternates between these two who have to spy on the people whom they work for and

foil each other's plans. As their jobs become harder and harder, they have to question themselves why they are there at all. Also, Colin's girlfriend is Billy's shrink, which provides for another unnecessary layer of dual contrast between these two.

As long as the movie glides on the opposite sides of the same intrigue, it is interesting. It is when this duality disappears and the two strands become one, the movie becomes slow and meandering and comes to a lackadaisical halt.

The Departed is planted in Boston, a place washed with the experience of the Irish immgirants. The problem though, is that the Irish angst depicted here looks dated and the class difference theme has become obsolescent. The fact that the movie would have looked stylish in 1970s doesn't help matters at all. I think why it garnered so many glowing reviews is because it is a reasonable thriller which satisfies the need for bullet-pumped, slang- driven excitement without offending the critic's sensibilties: the two leads are not "heroic" and the movie doesn't have a "happy" ending.

Jack Nicholson's Costello is suitably kooky. Supporting actors Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg, are on the mark. Matt Damon acts like he is reading to a dictaphone and vera Fermiga is probably the worst romantic lead I've ever seen.

Leonardo Di Caprio in The Departed

But, there is one genuine surprise the movie offers: the performance of Leonardo Di Caprio who plays Billy Costigan. He's being portratyed as an able discipile of Mr.Scorceses but it is he who shoulders the movie, not the director. I hadn't expected that from Mr. Di Caprio nor had I expected that I, who is prone to take the stuff that happens on the screen without getting involved, would start to care for his Billy so much as to hope that he would come through the whole thing alive.

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Financing the First World War by Hew Strachan

November 6th 2006 08:08

Hew Strachan’s Financing the First World War looks at the war from a very unusual angle. When I picked up the book in the library, the librarian was impressed. She thought it was unusual too.

At the beginning of the World War I, London was the world’s financial capital. At its end, its position was taken by New York. The book describes in detail the vicissitudes in fortunes of the main players of the war.

It gives you a low-down of the stock market fluctuations, currency vagaries, loans and moratoria troubles and the gold standard problems that beset the war. It omits any details of small change like you know the number of deaths, the battles won and lost, the politics, the politicians, in short, it omits any of the conventional details of what you might call a war narrative and focuses on its financial underbelly. That gives you a tremendous insight into how wars are fought and lost and how important a good financial policy is to waging a war.

I am no economist and I must confess that I found a lot of the verbiage used in this book daunting. Nevertheless, I kept reading the book without giving up; it’s that good! Thought it’s clearly intended for the scholarly circuit, it is a small book and with a little effort, can be grasped easily by others as well.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Non-Fiction

   

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Shall We Tell The President? by Jeffrey Archer

November 2nd 2006 05:11

Shall We Tell The President? by Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer's neat little thriller Shall we tell the President? follows the fortunes of Florentyna Kane, the newly elected first woman president of the United States. Florentyna first appeared as a side character in Archer's iconic Kane and Abel. Archer then gave her a full-length novel The Prodigal Daughter, wherein she was at a hair's breadth from becoming the President. Tise novel opens with her inauguration as the President

When an illegal immigrant is shot in the leg and requests to talk with the head of FBI, two agents are sent to the hospital. The man tells them of a plot to assassinate the President and very quickly one of the agents and thier boss are murdered and so is the informant. It falls to the other agent Mark Andrews to foil the assassination attempt.

Now, here is the problem I have with this novel. The informant was an illegal immigrant from Greece who waited at a table, because the people had asked for a waiter who didn't know English. Our man could not speak English but could very much understand it. So, when the conspirators gab on about their supposed plan in the earshot of the waiter, the plot kicks off. I know we need an informant but why in the heck will people converse about an assassination attmept in a hotel room after asking for a waiter?

After this uncovincing start, the novel pretty much develops into a high-octane chase to catch the conspirators including a senator. Archer is a Tory and he has that fascicantion of noticing how things are done and fills the novel with many little details about ceremonies, status and power. But this is one lean book and our interest never flags for a moment. In fact, I read this novel in one sitting.

Not one of Archer's best but a very entertaining novel.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Thrillers