Up in the Air

Up in the air and down to earth

The irony of watching ‘Up in the Air’ not long after I had set myself free of full-time employment was not lost on me. Having gone in the hope of watching anodyne rom-com (Oh, the promises of George Clooney!!) as a way of finding more suitable distraction for the mind than some obvious ones staring in the face, it was almost inevitable that the experience was likely to be more disappointing than distracting, analysis-provoking than anodyne. And so it was - if only because I had probably watched the film chasing the red herring and as opposed to the pink elephant in the storyline.
Up in the Air a supermodern film – to borrow French anthropologist Marc Auge’s term to describe those spaces and conditions the film is set in. The George Clooney character is a star employee of a company that gets hired by other companies to fire/downsize their personnel. His firm (and he by extension) are not responsible for the decision or indeed the scale of the downsizing, but for advising those who have been fired of the news and ‘make limbo comfortable’, as he puts it. Thus, the horror or the thrill of his job is not his to experience as his own. After all, he (or his colleagues) is there merely to convey the bad news someone else’s decision has brought into being, to someone whom he will never ever see again. His is a world of little or no responsibility, where decisions and consequences are always deferred, if not denied, making his life entirely derivative of the world of capital around him.
To borrow from Auge’s book its eponymous term, the film’s protagonist is entrenched in ‘non-place’, spending most of his waking and sleeping hours in spaces like airport lounges, aeroplanes, hotels, lobbies, bars, etc. Even the theatre of his work is not conducted in his own office but in a transitory space that is someone else’s, and with which he will only bear a momentary ephemeral relation. Leisure too is atomic and in fact, he is shown to party at an event neither he (nor the others with him) is invited to. Love, work and leisure are all experienced and partaken in at a remove, making attachment and its consequences the spine of the film.
The film begins by presenting us with the contradictory pulls of attachment for Clooney. He is not in a relationship (but perhaps has meaningless flings or affairs, the narrative seems to suggest). Yet, at the same time, he is completely devoted to the concept of fidelity – expressed through his obsessive relationship with airmiles, hotel cards, and other loyalty points. The graphite card status with American Airlines is what he states as his ultimate goal, and which he is very close to achieving as the film begins. Fidelity to work and its extensions, and non-relation to human beings then become the perfect pretext for the type of female characters the film then introduces.
The two women characters in the film are there to disrupt his bubble of non-place. Neither of them do so by taking up oppositional or confrontational positions. In fact, both in their own different ways are consonant, successful and at ease with this same life themselves. The Vera Farmiga character is presented as the romantic interest and as Clooney’s mirror image (‘Just think of me as someone who’s just like you, but with a vagina’), and whom he meets from time to time in these transitory and non-spaces. It is a meeting in a familial context (his sister’s wedding, with whom his relationship is at best thin) that occasions the moment of slippage for him – of sliding into a desire for transforming the connection to an attachment.
The other female character is the new kid on the block at work, and who is extremely competent and ambitious, if a neophyte. Whilst Farmiga provides a foil for his unmooring from non-place as a result of human attachment and the cycle of expectations it sets into play, the Anna Kendrick character exposes the chinks in his professional armour, when her proposal at work, if successful, could threaten the viability of Clooney’s own job. Thus for Clooney, the quandary Kendrick’s character brings implies that she is not only to be won over, but also tamed and reformed. It is no surprise therefore that the only successful human relationship that emerges in the film’s narrative is between Clooney and Kendrick.
The film proceeds to its denouement whereby Clooney finds himself in pursuit of the goods of attachment, only to find that human relationships are unattainable or a chimera. But this does not seem to be the central concern of the fim in some ways, having spent a greater part of its narrative landscape on how the threat to the existence of work is fought, negotiated and ultimately won over. In the film, human relations are fragile, duplicitous, or impossible, whereas work is the ultimate meaning-making, meaningful and precious relationship.
This then is Clooney’s real romance in the film. So, while he does not get the girl (much to thwart the rom-com hopefuls), he does win in romance. His failures in all other areas – family and romantic relationships, for example – provide a backdrop against which his non-embedded life is brought into an ever sharper relief. And like the proverbial hero, in the context of rampant job cuts and retrenchment, he alone is successful in staying true to his. In succeeding to keep his job, he does win his love interest in the end.
Up in the Air is a paean to work, to disembedded life, a celebration of deep alienation from the content of one’s work, all of which are incredibly zeitgeist. The subplots exist to strengthen this. Farmiga is exactly like him, but can only do so as a result of effecting a split – i.e. she is revealed to have a husband and children, something that comes as a shock to Clooney. This shock is as much about the unattainability of human relationships in this supermodern dystopia, as it is about the horror of knowing what he had come very close to doing (i.e. in stepping into such a split himself). He retreats swiftly and finds himself comforted by the innumerable possibilities and potentialities of an airport departure lounge, in the end. He is reunited with his disembedding. He is whole again.
So, I now must stop, and attend to my pile of unfinished work, in the hope that I too will feel a bit more complete, and a lot less bereft.

London Shuffle

I have been part of that noticeable minority in urban spaces that does NOT walk their iPods for their daily constitutional. Until this last week, I did not own a contraption that would blare out rhythm and blues into aural space at will and at random (if one so wished, of course). Well, all that was disrupted with finality last week when I received a present from a friend in the form of a iPod Shuffle. I know, I know – but really, for a newbie like me, it was even better than the real thing, and for once I could not care less about the absence of baselines.
And so, I prepared it for its first outing. I tucked away the little blue thing in the front pocket of my satchel, and boarded a bus to central London on a Friday evening in anticipation of friendly chatter and romcom distraction. It would take the bus roughly 40 minutes to reach the destination. I made myself comfortable on the upper deck, and with the latest issue of the LRB upright in front of my eyes, I gingerly proceeded to extricate my earplugs. Earlier that afternoon I had delegated all responsibility to iTunes to upload a random selection of music on this little creature – which could potentially be anything from Bryn Terfel to Bhupinder to Blur, from Cecilia Bartoli to Chaka Khan, from Handel to Hasrat Jaipuri!
So here I was, on route 19, and cruising along Roseberry Avenue when the first note accosted my ear-canal. FATTY!!!! Plus plus plus I went on the volume. Mann kunto maula, went the old boy’s incantation and Exmouth Market looked like I had never seen it before. In all my years in this city I had never experienced its visual with an aural other than the one it already offered in the noise of human and non-human traffic. Background music. It was as if my long bus ride in annoying Friday evening traffic had been transported on to a giant 70mm WITH Dolby!!!
Fifteen minutes and two traffic signals later we were standing still at Holborn, and Nusrat had been nudged out by an upbeat beat. I looked a bit embarrassed. I glanced around. My neighbour did not seem to have noticed the difference. Really? I was in naff space. The Pointer Sisters were asking us all to JUMP. JUMP, FOR MY LOVE. And all I could visualise was Hugh Grant as if in a repeat of Love Actually, dancing in a hall of mirrors. Except that there was nothing moving. We waited patiently for the traffic signal to turn to green. And whilst I felt obliged to lower the volume, I could not bring myself to disrupt Hugh Grant’s gig with the mirrors. And of course Perry Anderson read well against the cadence.
Soon it was Kishore Kumar (Dev Anand in my head) cavorting to Waheeda Rehman (in my head, of course) in Prem Pujari. The most familiar bits of London had been rendered strange in its new aural envelope. And when Farida Khannum pleaded, Aaj jaane ki zidd na karo just as the Number 19 glided past Foyles, I really could not take it any more.
It was violent – this intrusion, collision. My midnight crashing against my broad daylight whilst I sat nonplussed right where the whole world was sectioned off making way for the denouement of this privation.
Let me sing you a waltz, urged Julie Delpy. No, I said, resolutely. Scholl’s Orfeo begged Eurydice, at which point Curzon Soho seemed like a good excuse for a finishing line. I switched it off. Hastily. 19, Wardour Street, announced the automated PAS. It was comforting to revert to type, to hear the noise of human and non-human traffic once again.
London had been transformed, in some ways forever. As Doris Day crooned on the way back– Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!

synchroni-cities - new york/elsewhere: fehrist/wishlist

Check out this most fabulous bit of terse verse!!

synchroni-cities - new york/elsewhere: fehrist/wishlist

Love at First Slight

Love at First Slight

I have to begin with a confession - I have only just seen the Before films by Robert Linklater. Having seen Julie Delpy's latest French offering (Two Nights in Paris) - I felt almost compelled to chase my new addiction. And so I dug up Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Now that I have seen the two, I wonder if there is a third, fourth, fifth sequel. And I want to protest if the answer is no to any one of those!!!
For everyone else on this planet who already knows about the Before twin offerings - skip from here until I am done, but for those who are like me until recently living in relative ignorant bliss - here's what the plot is in a precis. American Boy meets French Girl on train in Europe on way to airplane to America. They start to talk. He proposes she gets off at Vienna with him and spend the rest of the day with him before he leaves for the airport to take his flight. She does. A lot of conversation later, the film ends and they both decide on a date and time for their next rendezvous but do not exchange numbers or addresses (okay this is a pre-email/ skype/ FB film). That's what happens Before Sunrise.
In real time - nine years later, and now the twenty somethings are thirty somethings. American Boy is now celebrated author of a novel loosely based on that one encounter with French Girl and is in Paris for book launch and promotion. She turns up at a book signing event and of course just hours before he has to take that plane back to America. Before Sunset is then the continuation of the conversation started nine years ago. And no they did not meet on the set date nine years ago - and so have much to catch up on and only measured time in which to do so. Cafes, parks, La Seine, barges on La Seine offer context and pretext for breathless conversation that brings time, audience and characters forward by nine years. It is infectious this conversation - you are drawn, withdrawn, with it, from it, to it. Linklater films Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as if it is in real time - I catch myself tracing, tracking, looking for the cut, the edit - and believe me, it isn't easy.
But of course it is a slight - and like good slights, it works really well!!
This slight is about freezing the moment of wondrous communication and remembering that moment as perfect love and the one with whom that communication is with as the perfect lover. Better or worse still, measuring everything else against that one frozen moment - and rusing that nothing ever matches up, and ruing at the imperfection of the world!!
Watching these films when you are just about ready to hit Habermas over his head with his two-volumes on Communicative Action - because you are convinced no one really listens when it really matters - and that people only hear not what they want to hear, but when they want to hear - these films sell you that Habermasian ideal. Until now, I had never thought of JH as the potential patron saint of Men-Are-From-Mars-Women-Are-From-Venus-Dot-Com. But hey, look how wonderful and truly gratifying it is if in your twenties you meet just the person who can hear your eyes move nano-inch by nano-inch in those 2.2 sound boxes in music shops, and when you are thirty something can listen in your gloating reminiscencing of your two-year old wondrous, wonderful child - that all is really not well. Especially when you don't have all the time in the world to get on with things. And the whole point is to achieve maximum communicative rationality (or rather irrationality - considering this is all about lurve), in the shortest possible time to achieve the maximum potential for an ideal and idealised togetherness! And really never have to test it in real time!!
Lurvely!!
Truly.
Madly.
Deeply!

Okay - for those of you who haven't seen this - go and see it, and tell me if these Before films are the biggest con in this world - a whole capitalist conspiracy to keep you and me stupefied in the potential, in that never-will-it-be-possible-but-go-on-the fantasy-alone-is-worth-it..
In the meanwhile I am taking a train to rural Hungary to take a train to Vienna, Paris and who knows write a novel en route!

Zizek, Burma

Well, at another plenary Zizek spoke - or ranted rather - characteristically for the United European Christian Brotherhood - and admonished the middle classes for thinking thought that comfort was to be had in marching against regimes on saturdays. In many ways - objectionable though his position on Europe, Christianity, Brotherhood may be - he had a point. The solace or worse the high ground that European middle classes had assumed from having walked ten steps on a cold spring Saturday against the war in Iraq - was actually rooted in something quite hollow. Where Zizek characteristically slipped was in his attribution of the hollowness. Christian Europe was acting in too Christian a manner in countering this barbaric threat of terrorism from a militant Islam - according to Zizek. I.e Zizek though the middle classes were being too civilised about the war and the roots of the clash.
One can of course pick on each bit of Zizek's argument to reveal centuries of prejudice, but let that be for another time. But
I think he did pick on something interesting in talking about the solace of the middle classes - and the general futility of political protest on the street and that's what I want to pick up here.
It's like feminism. Just because women in Euro-America are giving up work in favour of becoming consumerism driven (largely) yummy-mummies, the rest of us are forced to reckon with the world as having become 'post-feminist'! Just try to run past that logic anywhere outside Euro-America and you sound like retrogressive and not post-anything at all really! Similarly, the likes of Zizek and theri pampered kin reckon that the world is supposed to have become bored of political protest, shouting in the street, or so it seems. In Zizek's Europe, the only reason one would put on our black march shoes would be for comforting the soul and not ousting a regime, but then really chicken soup is better and easier to do!
I heard this relentless attack on the 'rest of the world' by Zizek and empathised with a friend who did out his Christian soft spot, to which Zizek replied - "fuck you, i am christian and proud of it." We heard Zizek indulgently and a week later, images of monks in Burma began to flood the screens - tv, internet, newspapers, to say nothing of the frenetic activity in blogosphere! So perhaps Zizek did have a point - the middle classes in Euro-America protest in namby-pamby way (blogs, for example) and politics is reduced to its virtual version. And in the non-middle class world, non Euro-American world this world of namby-pamby, softly softly, please can i protest today, sort of way, protest has absolutely no connect with the polity and the polity has no regard for it.
But in recent months Nepal, Burma, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan - protest here is not made up of the middle classes. Or that they do not form its only or dominant platform. Because ultimately here what is at stake is not a politics of solace, of feel-good, of soft-power, but of what tomorrow looks like and how you can limit the opponent from defining it completely. Realpolitik. So perhaps Zizek was right about the middle classes - but except he was not. He critiqued protest more than he criticised power in his talk. And like a good Christian European philosopher forgot to mention, remember that he was talking about and from a culturally specific position and that there was a whole world that thrived outside it. Even if blogosphere does not, the monks in Burma have showed Zizek his relative place.

"Get real, Prof!!"

"Get real, Prof!!"
(Renuka Narayan, columnist, to the historian Professor Shrimali, on We The People, NDTV)

"A book you wish you’d written?
David Lodge’s Small World. The last in a trilogy, it’s a scathing satire on academic hypocrisy. I wish I could write a similar one on our own jholawalas."
(Excerpt from an interview with Ira Pande, sometimes author, in Tehelka)

Last evening I was with friends and recounting the chain of statements on the latest episode of Barkha Dutt's slugfest show, and wondering aloud how and why a new attitude that can be characterised as dismissiveness at best and downright contempt at worst has begun to target the Indian social scientists in particular and academics in general. And when I chanced on Pande's statement whilst browsing this afternoon, at first it incensed me. What precisely was the ground Pande thought she was standing on from where she could just rattle off an attack of that nature? Or had I misread something?

Gradually the anger subsided I and instead I became more puzzled by this new target of venom and public ridicule. Many questions that we had thrown up collectively the precious evening rang ever more pertinent. For example, what could be the source of this new-found confidence and legitimacy to shout down a university professor, who was if nothing else just presenting his own (no doubt qua expert) opinion on the wretched Ram Setu issue, just like all the other experts on the show, including three politicians and Narayan as an journalist specialising in faith issues? I suspect that someone like Narayan would not easily allow themselves to be so utterly aggressive in full public glare to even the least respected and respectable politician, bureaucrat or any other kind that makes it to such televsion shows. I'm not concerned here about the content of her fracas with Shrimali - and I do not advocate for a second that consensus and politeness should dictate politics generally. Nor is it the fact that journalists and academics have been all lovved up. All the same, what the outbursts from Pande and Narayan signal is something new, and I think its roots do not lie in the mutual suspicion society that journalists and academics have run all along.

Consider Pande's light touch on these matters - what is she griping about? That the so-called jholawalas are hypocrites. For they practice not what they preach. The assumption is that the jholawalas are left-leaning in their sympathies, and write left-leaningly, but live otherwise. Pande's attack is not directed at the content and/or its merit of the jholawala's work (she would be hard-pressed to do that), but something other than that - i.e. their lifestyle. But she should perhaps consider the white khadi-wearing politicians, whose scale of hypocrisy is perhaps more worthy of analysis. Or even the hypocricy of our bureaucrats, who actually do not deliver on what they've signed up to. And what Narayanan is angry about is that the historian is out of touch and does not really understand what was going on at ground zero.

And I want to ask why Pande would not pose these questions to a whole raft of others, if at all personal lifestyle is to be made a measure of professional acumen, and Narayanan (and Barkha Dutt by extension) why she chose to shout that way not at even the CPI nominee who was giving a much more pogrammatic line on scieintific nationalism, but at Shrimali. MWhilst journalists and social scientists had much more in common in mission and status up until recently, the corporatisation of the media in India has shifted allegiances of the profession (in terms of salaries and mission) in sometimes unwitting opposition to those of the critical social scientist.y hunch is that the two instances of easy aggression have something to do with the lowered tolerance for criticism of India Shining. Unlike their scientist bretheren, social scientists in India are perceived by the chatterati as being irritants if not completely useless in the neoliberal food-chain.

Lack of criticism and an overbearing consensus is a recipe of disaster in any society. Fortunately, even though they are the most visible and pampered and locquacious, the middle classes in India are not all that make up India and the whole country does not dance to their favourite tune. Ask the BJP!

Parzania

Parzania (n.) A fantasy land where castles are made of chocolate and halwa and people never fight.

Well, if Chak De India suggested that the national community is one that has to be constantly worked into being, then here it is where you start from and watch it crumble. Set in the context of the Gujarat riots, the film makes a compelling case of the fragility of goodness in everyday lives. All saccharine and sweet family life of a Parsee family is brutally destroyed by a marauding mob of Hindu fanatics on the hunt for every last drop of Muslim blood.

My point follows from my previous post on Chak De India. Even in this most brutal and unpunished act of genocide committed in recent times, it is not the Indian Muslim who has a chance of becoming the subject of this narrative - just the backdrop, perhaps the excuse, if not the reason, why the plight unleashed by this most inhumane episode can be and must be told. Parzania is a story about the unwitting victims of this inhumanity. It seems impossible even in this supposedly magnanimous tale of disenchantment with the forever failing state that the first and foremost target of Modi's marauding can speak and demand justice from the state and call its flight from responsibility on its face!

There are of course many other things to say about Parzania, but for the moment, and in the light of the last post - let this suffice.