A Self-Indulgent Work of Staggering Banality

I've been meaning to update this thing for awhile, and I haven't had the heart to do so for lack of anything to say. Lately, though, I've realized that I never really had anything to say, and that most of these entries have been self-indulgent disjointed rants which have nonetheless amused some of my friends. Perhaps it is precisely the pointlessness of my posts which has made them appealing to the few who like them, and thus, it would be folly to bide my time waiting for inspiration when I should just write.

Today, I've been feeling the urge to write again, and this time, however weird and tangential, I think I have something to say. Thus, this article could be the most intricate and entertaining entry I've posted so far-or the most disappointing, ill-thought out, meandering tissue-of-horseshit I've ever foisted on you people. I suppose we'll let history decide, lol.

Lately I've been "meditating" on the idea that "everything is connected", that fluffy sounding New Age truism which, according to some, has found some confirmation in quantum theory. This idea though is a fascinating one. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and I am now being affected, in ways I could never conceive, by international and historical forces outside my control, by people I'll never meet, by books I'll never read, by events I'll never hear about in countries I'll never visit. It's when these interesting patterns suddenly reveal themselves, in even the most trivial form, that I feel I catch a faint glimpse of the sheer scale and intricacy of the world and it's history, and that is truly something special.

I'm enrolled in Anthropology 101 right now, and we've spent the last few weeks discussing Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. In ten days, it will be Darwin's two hundredth birthday, and so I've been frequently finding him in the news. Several times I've found myself listening to a story about Darwin's upcoming birthday on NPR while driving to my Anthropology class to talk about him for two hours.

Much has been made of the fact that Darwin and our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, are the exact same age having both been born on the same day (February 12th) in 1809. Several articles in the February issue of the Smithsonian's magazine have made much of this fact, and it's symbolic and poetic implications. For my part, I took Poli Sci last semester in the same classroom in which I'm now taking Anthropology, but I guess that's not much.

But driving back from Anthropology today, I heard on NPR that Wedgwood China was in serious trouble. The English China company had apparently merged with Ireland's Waterford Crystal, and now both were in trouble, planning to go their separate ways, and possibly on the verge of bankruptcy. I found this interesting since Wedgwood's founder, Josiah Wedgwood, was the maternal grandfather of Charles Darwin, and the Wedgwood fortune was part of the reason Darwin could afford to neglect his studies and take that now famous pleasure cruise aboard the HMS Beagle in 1829. Indeed, it was Wedgwood who persuaded Darwin's father to allow him to go.

When I got home, I made myself some lunch and then set out to run my big errand for the day: mailing two books back to my cousin in India. One was a copy of Q and A the 2005 novel by Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup and the loose basis for this year's Oscar favorite Slumdog Millionaire.The second was a 2009 planner put out by an Indian Newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle. I guess that each year's planner has an Indian historical figure- theme, because this was a Tippu Sultan-themed planner with his biography on the first page and countless portraits of the South Indian monarch displayed throughout. The planner was tempting to keep since it smelled like India and would be a wonderful talisman and reminder of home to have throughout this challenging semester. Nonetheless, I had to return it. My cousin sent both of these books to me as a gift, and as I am no longer speaking to her, I can't accept them.

I don't know what it is about my cousin, Y. but for as long as I can remember I've found her simultaneously compelling and horrible. She is almost fourteen years older than me and seems like my antithesis in every way. She is a neat, precise and determined professional, the editor-in-chief of the Chennai Deccan Chronicle, who is charming and yet secretive, protective of her privacy and (as far as I can tell) adept at Machiavellian social-combat if her bubble is threatened. I'll admit, right off the bat, that my issues with her are pretty trivial, but I simply feel that I've been ignored and condescended-to by her for the past twelve years, and this has all come to a head very recently. After feeling evaded and talked-down-to in a series of emails we exchanged, I sent her a vitriolic missive, intending to force her to talk to me or end our relationship for good. She never replied, and a few weeks later I discovered that she'd blocked me on facebook.

My mother returned from India a few weeks ago, and she brought me these books from Y. It felt like a slap in the face. It was as though she was writing off my anger as some childish temper tantrum. It was her way of being better than the whole problem. And plus it seemed, blatantly, like a tactic. She's known for her hospitality, for lavishing gifts on people and for adamantly accepting nothing in return. But she's much stingier with people she knows well, and seems to give gifts and do favors only to win people over. Feeling like I couldn't keep both these gifts and my integrity I decided to mail them back. This package is the silver bullet and the horse's head in her bed. It is an act of vengeance, a weapon, a tactic and a message.

Q and A is a story of Love, Tippu Sultan's life, a story of War. Tippu, the “Tiger of Mysore”, was a brutal Muslim ruler who forcibly converted Hindus on pain of death. In Karnataka, there is a spot called Tipu's Drop, where the Sultan's men would hurl recalcitrant Hindus to their death. Still he made gifts of jewelry and land grants to Hindu temples in order to curry favor with Hindu rulers. (These highly political “gifts” seem similar in intent to the books given me by my cousin, how fitting, then, his likeness on the cover of that planner.) He also waged a series of long wars against the British, the Anglo-Mysore wars. A drawn out clash between East and west which would claim his life in 1799. “Mohammed Faisal-Iftekar” (the pen name of an anonymous Pakistani writer) referenced Tippu in the title of his 2006 novel, The only King to Die on the Battlefield.

Like the war between Tippu and the British, the feud between Y. and myself is a clash between east and west, but the act of mailing back her books feels to me more like an act of vengeance than an act of warfare. Perhaps the best known revenge tale in modern times is Alexandre Dumas' The count of Monte Cristo. First Published between the years 1844 and 1846 (or from the year Charles Darwin began, tentatively, to outline in writing his theory of natural selection to the year Abraham Lincoln was elected to his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives.) The count of Monte Cristo also seems to me a classic David and Goliath story, Edmond Dantes is persecuted by well-connected noblemen who conspire to have him imprisoned for life. On making public his theory of natural selection, Darwin made an enemy of the Church of England, and risked association with revolutionary France (then under the rule of the “citizen king” Louis-Phillipe, former employer and ally of Alexandre Dumas). John Wilkes Booth probably thought of himself in similar terms when he assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, I've often viewed the conflict between Y. and myself this way as well.

Jules Verne, also French, created his own enduring revenge-obsessed character, Nemo captain of the Nautilus. Nemo was an Indian nobleman whose family was killed during the Sepoy Mutiny. Nemo's name is Latin for “No One” and Greek for “I give what is due”, some believe Verne took his name from the Scottish motto “Nemo me impune lacessit” or “No one impunes me unpunished”. Like Yagna and myself, Nemo is Indian, and like the other characters in this story he is David, in this case fighting the Goliath of Imperialism and in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a literal giant monster.

The character Nemo is also allegedly the nephew of Tippu Sultan.

Whew! Thank god for wikipedia. Moving right along., Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. While taking in a popular play by playwright Tom Taylor entitled Our American Cousin, about “the introduction of an awkward boorish American to his aristocratic English relatives” (I think that one is self-explanatory). Taylor also served as Editor-in-Chief of Punch magazine, which inspired an Urdu-language Indian spinoff, Awadh Punch which, like Nemo, was a thorn in the side of India's British rulers.

Y. is also the editor-in-chief of an Indian newspaper.

Awadh Punch had a series of ambitious and intelligent young writers associated with it, which helps explain it's success. The Deccan Chronicle, likewise owes it's success to its charismatic owner Venkattram Reddy. His story looks more like William Randolph Hearst's than Awadh Punch's, however. Alexandre Dumas appears to have had a similar savvy when it came to dealing with newspapers and this allowed him to maintain his extravagant lifestyle.

William Randolph Hearst's life became the basis for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, (and the story of the battle between Welles and Hearst which ensued is another David v.s. Goliath story). In the movie, Charles Foster Kane erects a pleasure palace/hideaway in which to essentially imprison his wife. That Palace is called Xanadu, named for the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “...In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately palace build...". Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's grandfather was a great patron of Coleridge, giving him enough money to live on without working so he could focus on his art.

Coleridge was a freethinking follower of William Godwin, and thus likely opposed to the racist outlook of his era's Imperial powers. Imperialism shaped the lives of many people in this story, from the bitter Indian submarine captain Nemo, to Dumas (the son of an Afro-Carribean former slave, his race caused problems for him all his life) to Darwin (whose theories would be misinterpreted and misrepresented by the Eugenics Movement and the Social Darwinists, in fact, his own son would become a follower of eugenics) to Lincoln who, of course, was the great emancipator.

Lincoln presidency was characterized by the American Civil War, and, despite a cynical outlook toward politicians in general I have a bit of a soft spot for him. He would ultimately pay a high price for his role in that war, and so “Faisal-Iftekar” to the contrary, I think Lincoln could be considered another king who died on the battlefield.

Vietnam was another war which colored the terms of many U.S. presidents. To me, (as well as thousands of assassination buffs) however, the one who payed the highest price for his role in that war was JFK who also suffered a high profile assassination in 1963, the year Vikas Swarup, author of Q and A. was born. Swarup is a Indian diplomat, and Kennedy placed an emphasis on diplomacy, wanting to create an atmosphere of detente.

And what are diplomats if not communicators. Communication is the bridge between people and is antithetical to war. (“What we have here is a failure to communicate” says Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke, another David and Goliath tale.) Though Kennedy tried, it is Reagan who is remembered as the great communicator. Reagan, second in popularity only to our doomed President Lincoln.

In the story of Y. and myself, there is no communication. In fact it was a lack of communication from her end that caused the whole house of cards to fall in the first place, but then I'm sure in this I am equally culpable.

In any event, this package is a message, a form of communication. Hermes, the messenger god, god of communication, gave Perseus the weapons by which he slew Medusa. So too, will I, using this message, confront my own Medusa, my own Goliath, and as it travels straight and true across the Pacific, with what lives will it intersect? And what will be the ramifications of its arrival?