Visual India
Last weekend, I joined with some friends for a night of Indian food and a screening of the Criterion release of The Darjeeling Limited on blu-ray. It was a fun night all the way around.
After traveling to India several times, (always working, never for simple tourism), I've become very attached to Indian culture. I'm certainly not an expert, but I enjoy the food, the art, the history, and most of all, speaking with the people there. One is hard-pressed to find kinder, gentler and more interesting people than those who live in India.
India has become popular in America over the past few years. I think that mass notice of Bollywood and its surrounding culture has had something to do with that it. Personally, Bollywood song-and-dance films are [very] far from my favorite genre of cinema, but I do enjoy the energy they convey. India is incredibly well-suited for such an indigenous film industry, because the country is so amazingly visual.
The visual beauty of India almost belies the poverty and grittiness of what everyday life is really like there. The people are so colorfully arrayed, the landscape is so varied and the traditional architecture is so nuanced that it is harder to attain bad imagery than good imagery in such an environment.
I think that its sheer visual beauty has led to many Americans falling in love with the idea of India without ever facing the country itself. I said as much to a German backpacker I spoke to at the Delhi airport earlier this year. She was going home after several weeks in Goa, and she said to me "I don't see many Americans traveling in India. Why do you think that is?"
Given the amount of business we do in India, I was surprised that Americans seemed underrepresented in a vacation hotspot like Goa, but I could understand why, and said as much in my response.
"I think that most Americans like the idea of India--the colors and the food. They just aren't too crazy about the smell."
Possibly a harsh thing to say, but I still feel it to be true on principle. India is a shocking country to visit upon one's first arrival into a nation where the air smells like burning cow dung as much as it smells like cinnamon.
But the sheer beauty of the country, and the beauty of soul which shines out of the eyes of its people, will charm any visitor into submission. I was reminded of this while watching The Darjeeling Limited last night. It made me excited that Best Exotic Marigold Hotel opens in American theaters this week. It made me ecstatic to return to India myself later this year.
The beauty of India can almost be called a gateway drug to the culture. There is poetry in its harsh landscape and simple country dwellings. India's cultural fabric is a frenetic tapestry of crowded streets and heart-stopping traffic; shouts of the street vendors, passive-aggressive inquiries from beggars and blindingly white smiles from inquisitive children. The paradoxical contrast and cohesion of all these elements make it a country which lures in the curious and claims them for its own. Whether by force of charm or the underlying mystery which such a culture presents to outsiders, India is an experience.
The principal characters in The Darjeeling Limited are so representative of how visitors are affected by the country. That's one of the reasons why I love the film so much.
Francis (Owen Wilson) goes to "have an experience," but his purposeful strides from temple to temple, punctuated by side-trips for power adapters and painkillers hold him back from actually experiencing anything until he abandons his control issues by the end of the film..
Jack (Jason Schwartzman) distracts himself with his girlfriend in Europe and a temporary fling with a train attendant. He allows his more carnal impulses to distract him from the larger picture of what is going on around him. He allows the specific to totally detract from a full perspective.
And in the middle of it all is Peter (Adrien Brody), who seeks out novelties like a child, all the while resisting the responsibilities of being a father which await him at home. He matures by the end of the film, but one wonders how he ever expected to get a cobra through customs.
As an American, it is my responsibility to represent my country and my fellow Americans in a positive way. After all, we have set ourselves up as the guardians of world democracy, and it's the least we can do to be pleasant and teachable. We cannot allow inconvenience, different or expectation to hold us back from visiting countries like India.
The world is huge. Just think about it! Consider the varying climates and cultures in India, China, Egypt, Germany, Britain! And many people are content to spend their entire life living in one city, considering travel to be "for other people;" perhaps to be reserved as a reward given to one's self when too old to fully enjoy the experience.
Never settle for the sedentary life. The world is there for a reason. See it. And visit India first.
Easter versus Christmas
As a Christian, I support Easter. I support it on the basis of principle. Contrary to many people, I prefer it to Christmas.
Ghandi once said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” And it is so true! I say this as a Christian. Christ lived his life without fanfare, without dispensing judgement on everyone he met. He lived a life summed up by the word "love." It staggers me how few Christians' lives can be summed up in similar terms.
Christ did not ask for His birth to be remembered. However, he did request that we remember his death through the rite of communion. Communion is a purely symbolic practice, and Christ laid it out in the following terms:
And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him. And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer: For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. [Luke 22:14-20]
No such request was made for Christmas. Christians of the more conservative persuasion often contend that the early church practice of moving into a new area, "converting" the population and remodeling the native holidays with Christian iconography, means that Christians today should not recognize these holidays at all. Christmas, after all, is simply a replacement for pagan winter solstice holidays, and Easter, as a holiday, is tainted by lingering pagan fertility symbols.
While I would never be opposed to removing the commercial hoopla from what should be holidays of the spirit, I tend to see things along a different tack. Rather than grasping at some desperate argument from how holidays came to be celebrated, I prefer to go back to the source material for an answer. I realize that reading the Bible is become a novelty, what with the convenient alternatives of groupthink and popular opinion, but in the Bible, Christ himself said that he wanted his followers to remember the sacrifice he made for them. He didn't make that request of Christmas. Oddly enough, Christmas became the holiday most violently hijacked from its origins, extrapolated from the destitute birth of a child in a manger into a corporate juggernaut.
Meanwhile, Easter is simply a means for candy companies to break even through a few weeks of sugar-laden sales. What a shame. What a waste.
"Pointing the finger..."
Sometimes I become genuinely concerned about the future of interpersonal communication between people of my own generation. There is no shortage of ways to spread ideas, but there seems to be a lack of faculty to utilize these avenues.
Before going further, I want to preface my own thoughts with a quote from Rudolf Arnheim. Arnheim's essays throughout the 1930s on the subject of film, mass communication and psychology were far more insightful than most of what is written on the subject today. The following quote comes from Arnheim's 1938 essay "A Forecast of Television:"
Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to other made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
Read it again, but replace "television" with the "Twitter," "Facebook" or any other social networking service which has made shorthand communication popular and accessible. I firmly believe that these services have led to problems between how people relate to each other face-to-face.
Social networks are not a problem in and of themselves. From cuneiform inscriptions to Gutenberg's printing press to the iPad, ideas, throughout history, always utilize the latest advances in technology to spread from person to person. However, until the past few years, the communication of what happens in daily life required complete thoughts to be committed to letters or emails.
We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to other made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts.
Today, the capabilities of smartphones have finally equaled the possibilities offered by online social networks. It is no longer necessary to harness the power of words to describe what interesting things we saw in the course of a day; we can take a photograph with a mobile device and share it with the entire world in the space of a few seconds. I don't imply that this is a good or bad thing in and of itself, it is simply the place to which we as a culture have come.
Where I see a very definite problem with social networking is the irresponsibility with which it is used by the people who have grown up with it. The children of the Baby Boomers viewed the arrival of everything from text messaging to Facebook with varying degrees of suspicion, while their kids, who have known these advances from an early age, are not only comfortable with them, but are increasingly reliant on on them to communicate.
As a result of this reliance, the "shrinkage of the mind" which Arnheim mentions is increasingly apparent in conversation. There is an experiment which I like to perform to gauge people's use of language. When someone mentions having seen a new film or read a book, I ask them what it is about. If they start to tell me what happens in the plot, I stop them and say "I don't want to know what happened, I want to know what it was about; what the theme was." And, sadly, very few people seem concerned with the true meaning of what they watch or read. They fail to "draw the general from the specific."
I realize, and have previously written, that entertainment is less and less concerned with offering ideas that transcend aesthetics. As such, it isn't surprising that stories are viewed by most audiences as little more than a chain of events strung together without deeper meaning. However, I am growing concerned that an entire generation has grown up with little regard, or even awareness of thematics and meaning.
For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
Communication is necessary to life. But it isn't enough to "point the finger" with a photograph or a star rating. Language, and the full usage of it, is important. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he explored the idea of an oppressive state reducing the breadth of language to in order to communicate ideas efficiently and without emotion, as detailed by the character of Syme in chapter three:
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Prior to writing 1984, Orwell wrote on this subject in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," in which he discussed the effects of thought upon language, and of language upon thought:
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
I feel vindicated in my feelings on this subject when they are confirmed by a mind like Orwell's. However, unlike me, Orwell was able to find a foreseeable solution.
The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
It only remains necessary to impress the importance of language upon culture--language as a living, complete, exciting way of expressing thoughts and ideas. And in the age of convenience, when it there is the constant opportunity to reduce the human experience to a shared photo or a "check-in," therein lies the challenge.