Isn’t it wonderful when you call someone an idiot and he’s nice enough to actually prove again and again that he is one?

Remember Shravan? He’s blithering away again – this time claiming that women should be kept out of the army because they are weaker than men.

See first: his moronic post here. Then the comments section of the link to that post from Desi Pundit, including my take on his post here. Finally (via Desi Pundit) see Annie’s lovely reply to his post here.

There’s nothing like a good fisking to get you started in the morning.

Last night the rain was different. Weightier, more portentous. It arrived not with the light patter of a dancer’s feet, but with the deep sigh of a train pulling into a station. There was the same sense of anticipation fulfilled, of a relief that felt almost like excitement. Standing at the window, I saw the trees bending their backs to the storm’s baggage, preparing to be jostled. Fat drops of water clawed at the panes, fell clinking on the airconditioners. A sense of arrival was everywhere.

Back in bed again, I dreamed that the monsoon was a great locomotive, rumbling its way across the land. Gray-haired clouds turned restlessly within it, trying to fit their obese bodies to its sky-blue bunks, playing charades to pass the time.

I too was riding this train. I heard the thunder of its engines, the lazy rattle of its progress. Every now and then the train would stop, sometimes at a village station, sometimes in the middle of a field, and a cloud or two would hop off. There was no timetable to this, but the people must have known because wherever we stopped they were waiting to receive us.

And everywhere we went the children would come out to stare at this strange visitor, half-naked, amazed, wondering how far away it had come from; laughing and pointing, or just standing wide-eyed by the tracks, feeling the power of this apparition rushing down on them. Hearing the wind of it whistle through the fields. Seeing its windows flash like lightning in the night.

And afterwards, in the morning, the air cool, clean like metal. That newly washed sense of distance made possible.

Continental Flight 82 from Newark to New Delhi. Thirteen straight hours wedged in a window seat doing my imitation of a sardine. Elderly couple on the seats next to me (henceforth referred to as Auntyji and Uncleji), clearly flying back to India from the US for the first time ever. Falstaff being his considerate, helpful self. Unending drama.

Crisis 1: As the plane pushes back from the gate and begins to taxi towards the runway, Falstaff, being inexperienced in these matters, commits the terrible blunder of starting to read a book (a set of Cheever’s short stories). Immediate gasp of shock from his co-passengers. Doesn’t he realise that with his book raised up like that Uncleji can’t actually SEE the runway?! How does he expect the plane to take off if Uncleji’s visibility is impaired? How dare he put the safety of the entire plane in jeopardy this way?

Falstaff meekly lowers hands and continues to read with book held at arm’s length. Only now Uncleji’s pointing arm is in the way. Uncleji apparently feels that unless he carefully points out all the relevant sights to Auntyji, she might miss some of them (after all, there’s so much to see out of an aircraft porthole). The fact that in the process of doing this Uncleji narrowly misses taking Falstaff’s nose off does not apparently concern Uncleji.

Crisis 2: The first on-screen announcements begin. The message flashing on the blue screen reads: “We hope you had a pleasant flight. Thank you for flying with us. We appreciate your business” and “Please ensure that all relevant paperwork is completed before disembarking from the plane”. All this before our flight has taken off.

Uncleji has noticed this. He excitedly points this out to all those sitting around him, but the rest of us just shrug, figuring someone goofed up and it’ll be corrected soon enough. Uncleji, however, belongs to a generation that is much less apathetic about matters of national importance, and feels duty bound to jump up from his seat (disregarding the fasten seat-belts sign, but what’s a little risk when such weighty matters are at hand) and go find a harried flight attendant who he can explain this to. Eventually (some ten minutes later), the announcements get corrected. Uncleji beams with a hero’s pride.

Crisis 3: Auntyji and Uncleji have ordered special vegetarian meals. Said meals contain rice (check), pickle (check) but (horror of horrors!!) no CURD!! This is unacceptable. Even westernised barbarians like Falstaff, who are eating Chicken Cacciatore, get curd. (And pickle. Because there’s nothing like a little imli flavouring to spice up your pasta sauce). Uncle-ji indignantly tries to catch flight attendant’s eye. Flight attendant, like all good waitstaff, has eyes carefully trained to remain uncaught. Eventually, growing desperate, Auntyji (who has clearly spent her two months in the US assidiously watching NFL) comes through with a flying tackle, stopping the fleeing steward in his tracks.

The news of the Great Curd Treason does not faze the steward, however. He points out that Auntyji and Uncleji had asked for a vegetarian meal and curd, being a dairy product, is non-vegetarian (where Continental came up with this particular brainwave is beyond me). That’s why they’ve been given grapes instead.

Brief moment of silence while Uncleji’s Tam Brahm brain struggles to cope with idea of grapes being a substitute for curd. Sound of bearings squealing, then giving way in protest. “But we want curd”, Uncleji says, with the kind of dogged consistency one hopes for from the Indian Cricket Team. Eventually curd is provided. Once again the good citizens of Gotham can sleep in peace.

Crisis 4: Meal over, Auntyji and Uncleji decide they’re in the mood for some in-flight entertainment. A fifteen minute struggle ensues, in which Uncleji unhooks his wife’s seat belt, switches all available reading lights on and off, reclines and brings forward his seat 273 times, narrowly escapes making long-distance calls to Swaziland and almost succeeds in connecting his headphones to the rivets holding his seat together, but is still no closer to actually switching his entertainment system on. At this point Falstaff’s earlier hooliganism (see Crisis 1) is forgiven and his help is enlisted. Falstaff proceeds to give careful instructions, helping Uncleji to get to point where he’s happily watching Video Channel 2. Uncleji then proceeds to ‘help’ Auntyji with her system. The fact that Auntyji seems to have managed to get the system to work by herself and is happily immersed in some inane Karishma Kapoor film (I know, I know – the adjective is redundant) makes no difference. She’s a woman, therefore it’s his duty to guide her.

Two minutes later Auntyji’s interactive screen menu has been ‘permanently’ set to Japanese, a language that Auntyji, sadly, does not understand. She’ll have to do without entertainment for the rest of the flight. Just her bad luck. Auntyji takes this philosophically. Uncleji however, decides that it’s best not to tempt fate by actually attempting to change channels on his screen, with the result that he proceeds to spend the remaining 11 odd hours of the flight watching endless repeats of Big Momma’s House 2 (clearly the folks at Continental have not read this).

Crisis 5: It’s time to fill out disembarkation cards. In the process of doing this, Uncleji discovers that they have only two luggage tags, though they’d checked in three bags. Panic. Falstaff (whose skill with entertainment systems has entirely redeemed him) is consulted, and is forced to admit that yes, there are only two tags when there should be three (the math to prove this is hard, but nothing that some elementary matrix differentiation can’t solve). An irate Uncleji proceeds to call the steward. Recriminations fly. Auntyji is almost in tears and is being consoled by other Auntji’s for her grevious loss. Uncleji is growing angrier and angrier. Other members of the crew have come over to see what the trouble is. People at the back of the plane are beginning to wonder if we’re being hijacked. A few of them are already trying to work out the best way to storm the cockpit.

At this point, one of the crew members points out that the tags in question are from April and are marked New Delhi to Newark. They are thus obviously the tags from the time that Auntyji and Uncleji flew to the US. The tags for this flight must be somewhere else. Auntyji proceeds to search desperately through her purse. Sure enough, three other tags emerge. It’s 8:00 pm in Delhi, 10:30 am in Newark, we’re 6th in the queue waiting to land, and all’s well with the world again.

P.S. Yes, I’m back in Delhi for six weeks. Hence the gap since the last post.

(or Time to be self obsessed)

Coming in through the doorway you pass through a narrow passage (closet on your right, bathroom on your left) to enter into the room proper. As you walk in, you find, immediately on your left, a small bookcase of blonde wood – 4 feet high and 2 feet wide. Careful scrutiny of this bookcase will show that it contains nothing but poetry: the top shelf is taken up by ‘classics’ (Virgil, Camoes, Dante) and the ‘English’ poets (Keats, Donne, Larkin, etc) while the second shelf contains American poetry. The third shelf from the top houses translations – containing, in order, poetry translated from Russian, Italian, Portugese, French, German, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Chinese, Persian and Urdu. The bottom shelf contains periodicals. These divisions are not rigid however. Lack of space and the owner’s natural laziness mean that Dickinson is squeezed between Marvell and Yeats, while Walcott, though writing in English, has ended up between Neruda and Li Po.

Above this bookcase, on the wall, a large poster (from an exhibition at the Met) of Van Gogh’s Thatched Huts at Cordeville Auvers. A flood of spring greenery flooding the landscape, pouring like a cataract from the horizon, down to where the lemon-yellow road yawns in a lazy triangle. Walls and fences are foreshortened, overwhelmed, the cottages themselves seem to grow out of the living land, spontaneous, organic, their roofs one with the scenery. Above these roofs trees swirl like billows of dark green smoke, and higher up still the sky is a whirling mass of azure and cobalt, punctuated by a white sinkhole of a sun into which the colour slowly drains. This is landscape as only Van Gogh could paint it, a quiet country scene revealed in all its teeming energy.

Standing in the centre of the room and turning your eyes clockwise from this painting, you come to two bookshelves on the left hand side wall. These contain prose – fiction on the top shelf (split between novels on the right and short fiction on the left), non-fiction on the bottom (philosophy on the right, other stuff – myth, criticism, biography – on the left). There is a third bookshelf further along the wall, but this one is flimsy and has therefore been relegated to bearing only a few plays (Lorca, Ibsen, Sartre, Ionesco) and miscellaneous papers.

Between these two columns of bookshelves, there is, pinned to the wall, a small (8 by 12 inch) print of Degas’ Dancer. In the background, three hazy figures emerge out of a wash of pastel and charcoal, more dervishes of motion than human beings. In the foreground, a fourth dancer, feet planted firmly on the floor, adjusts a bow behind her back. The scene itself suggests imminence, a sense of beauty waiting to happen. Degas sketches the outline of the figures themselves in clear charcoal, but uses no outline for their skirts, simply colouring them in with white and blue chalk and leaving their edges indistinct. The effect is at once ghostly and electric, at once starched and diffused. The sash that the main figure is tying around her waist sends a current of blue surging through the entire painting, so that an otherwise sepia piece is shot through and suffused with colour.

Above the unreliable bookshelf, a poster of Roy Lichtenstein’s Kiss V.

The last painting on the left wall, down towards the far end, (occupying pride of place in the form of the only nail in the whole room to hang paintings on) is another Degas, this one in pure charcoal – Woman in a Bathtub. Inside the great white circle of the bathtub, the figure of a woman sits on a chair, leaning down to wash her own feet (we see her shoulders, the back of her head, and her hand rubbing away at her foot). This is beauty joined to awkwardness – you can feel the strain as the woman reaches all the way down to her toes, but the figure itself is perfectly balanced, graceful, a circle as complete in herself as the bathtub she is sitting in. This is a deeply private, even intimate moment, but it is a moment rescued from all possibility of observation, from all need of external reference. This is the lyricism of our everyday solitude. Richard Wilbur writes: “The grace is there, / But strain as well is plain to see. / Degas loved the two together: / Beauty joined to energy.”

[The painting is special to me because it is the one painting I carry with me wherever I go. Originally a gift from my parents (obtained from an exhibition at NGMA in Delhi where the original was displayed), this solitary two-dimensional woman has been my constant companion ever since, adorning the walls of every room I have lived in for the past 7 years.]

The back wall of the room is taken up entirely by windows, so there is no place to hang a painting. On the floor, however, you will find a third Degas – this one a framed 30” x 18” reproduction of Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts. An explosion of orange announces the bursting forth of three figures – one with her back turned to the viewer, a second drinking a glass of water, a third making adjustments to her dress. As usual with Degas, you find yourself in the position of an unseen observer, a spy. None of these figures looks directly at you, they are clearly unaware of your presence, and uninhibited in their movements as a consequence. These paintings are more tenderly intimate than any explicit nude could ever hope to be, because they reveal not the nakedness of the body, but the nakedness of the self when it is not aware of being watched. Beauty, in Degas’ world, is intensely human and entirely ephemeral. But more than figures themselves, Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts is notable for the energy of its pallette – the boiling ochre of the background, the flaring yellow of the skirts, with their pattern of delicate blue flowers, the wash of poppy-like crimson at their feet.

Moving on to the right hand side wall, we find, spreading horizontally over the bed, a large poster of Dali’s Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire. A desert landscape. In the foreground, left, a woman sits at a table, facing away from the viewer, looking across to where, in a ruined building, the slave market is underway. The insubstantial, writhing figures of the slaves melt into the background, the transparency of their bodies merging with with the brown of wall and earth. Only the buyers and the traders are clearly defined, solid in their indifference. From within this mass of central figures, the bust of Voltaire appears and disappears. The table the woman is sitting at is covered with a cloth of lavish red, and two figures rest upon it – the first a chipped and broken base that props up Voltaire’s illusory bust, the second a smooth open chalice, from which the dream-like figure of a couple embracing in despair rises. Far away in the distance, other figures populate the desert. The sense of perspective is tremendous, as is the feeling of sorrow that almost bleeds from the painting. Even without the clever illusion of Voltaire’s bust this would be a mesmerising work, with it, the painting is an endless dream that deserves (and rewards) hours of contemplation.

But onward, onward. The last painting on the right hand side wall is Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) – a dizzying spiral of planes screaming into a trajectory of brazen gold. The ecstatic geometry of jazz.

Finally, on your left as you go out (on the same wall as the first Van Gogh, only on the other side of the passageway) a second, smaller Van Gogh. A tiny 8” x 12” print (the wall has space for nothing bigger) of Cypresses – that incredible vertical smoke-stack of a tree rising up into the heavens.

Looking around the room, it seems clear that the room has been recently cleaned and tidied, but that the occupant is not otherwise a habitually neat person. Already, the stray debris of living is starting to encroach upon the room’s formal, contrived neatness. Magazines lie spilled about the foot of the bed, a backpack has been thrown carelessly in a corner, a red coffee mug with two swallows worth of coffee rest precariously on the carpet, waiting to be kicked over.

By the bed, a large floor lamp. As you watch, this lamp comes on suddenly, causing you to start back in surprise. Don’t worry. It’s just that the lamp has a loose connection – it switches on and off by itself (though a quick pat will usually make it come on again). This unlooked for spontaneity can be irksome – especially when one is sleeping next to the lamp – but over the time the person who lives here has learnt to adjust even to this disturbance, though it still causes him to have some strange dreams.

You look up at the ceiling and see the red light of the smoke detector winking at you. What secrets does it know about this room and its tenant? It’s too late to find out now. You have to go. As you leave, a notice on the door reminds you not to use escalators in case of fire.

Categories: Personal

I support Tunisia.

Somebody has to.

Okay, okay, so I know they don’t have a hope in hell of winning (actually, I don’t know anything of the sort – in fact, I can safely say that I know absolutely nothing about Tunisian football. Or about football. Or about Tunisia. Except that Dizzy Gillespie seemed to like the nights there.), but wouldn’t it be fun if they did win? I mean really, what’s the point of going through all this brouhaha if at the end of it all Brazil is just going to take the cup. Again.

The trouble with competitive sport is that its fans still cling to the patently ridiculous notion that the winner should be the one with the most skill / talent. As if that mattered. As if the only civilised basis for deciding who wins wasn’t gender, or nationality, or general under-dogness. What’s with all this objectivity anyway? When are sports promoters ever going to realise that the sweetest moment in any contest is when the winner gets announced and everyone goes “The prize goes to Who?!! How the hell did he / she win?”. Think about the Booker. Think about the Nobel. Dammit, even an organisation as inherently stupid as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has got this figured out. Each one of these regularly gives away prizes to people who demonstrate no merit whatsoever, and consistently overlooks the truly deserving. That’s what I call a competition. It’s all about mixing it up. The thrill of the contest isn’t finding out who won, the thrill of the contest is arguing endlessly afterwards about whether or not they deserved to. The day they start judging World Cup matches based on the intensity of the leg-work and the beauty of a team’s post-modernist explorations of the off-side [1], instead of on something as crude as goals, is the day I’ll actually start watching football [2].

At any rate, I still maintain that it would be a much better cup for everyone if Tunisia won. Just think what wonders it would do for World Peace. All the football playing nations of the world (a list, which, conveniently enough, now includes the US) would come together in instant solidarity, drowning their common sorrows in a hazy mix of stale beer and nuclear non-proliferation treaties. Of course, Tunisia itself would have to be instantly liquidated with thermo-nuclear devices, but that’s easy enough – we can always think up some excuse…say they were developing WMDs, for instance…what’s that? That’s already been done? Hmmm. Oh, well, we’ll think of something. And let’s face it, it’s not like anyone’s going to miss Tunisia once it’s become a large cloud of radioactive dust. Most people won’t even notice. As for the Tunisians themselves, well, at least they’ll die happy, knowing they won the World Cup. What’s a little casual annihilation compared to the thrill of that?

In fact, the only downside I can see to Tunisia winning the World Cup is the astronomical amount of money I stand to lose because I’m too stingy to bet $5 on them at current odds (specially since all the other people betting on Tunisia would have been liquidated in the airstrikes). I could have retired on that money. (Or at least, I could have gone on not working, which is the same as retiring, only without the farewell parties). Damn you Spain! Damn you Saudi Arabia! You haven’t heard the end of this!

Or have you?

[1] I’m not entirely sure what the off-side is, btw. I’ve never been able to decipher whether it’s a real side or just a notional concept the guy running around with a whistle uses when he feels the whole thing’s looking too easy and the sponsors won’t like it. Kind of like the wrong side of the bed.

[2] Which is not to say that I never watch sport. On the contrary, I am frequently captivated by all kinds of sporting events, usually when there’s tons of work to do and I don’t feel like doing it. The zenith of my interest in cricket, for example, occured during the 1996 World Cup, which happened to coincide with my CBSE Board Exams. Even watching cricket was more fun than NCERT textbooks.

A blog is a book disappointed.
Let a thousand Leopold’s bloom.
Give us this day our daily dread,
Give us this night our stifling rooms.

Happy Bloomsday Everyone!

Categories: Miscellaneous

A man is placed inside a metal cube of edge 8 feet.

There are no windows in the cube, no inlet of air of any kind, and the door he came in through has been hermetically sealed from the outside.

The man is completely naked. He is 6 feet tall and weighs 75 kgs.

The only other object in the box with him is a handgun. The gun is loaded and contains 6 bullets.

The walls of the cube are made of reinforced steel. A bullet striking the side of the cube will ricochet. The only thing soft enough to stop a bullet in this entire arrangement is the man’s body.

With minimal activity levels, the air in the cube will last the man for upto 4 hours. Beyond that point the man will suffocate due to lack of oxygen.

Under no circumstances can the cube be opened for the next 24 hours. The man inside the cube knows this.

The man has the following options:

a) Take the gun and shoot himself in the head

b) Fire the gun randomly at the sides of the cube and wait to see where the ricochets strike him

c) Put the gun aside and wait patiently to die of suffocation

d) Disable the gun by smashing it against the metal walls and then wait patiently to die of suffocation.

e) Jump around inside the cube thus using up oxygen faster and hastening his death by suffocation. (Option e can be combined with either option c or option d)

Q1. Which of the following should the man choose? Why?

Q2. In your opinion, which is the bravest option of the five?

Q3. Which option would you choose if you were in this situation?

Q4. If you were the person who had put the man inside the cube, would you bother to open the cube after the 24 hours were up? Why / why not?

Categories: Whimsy

There are still twelve minutes to go before the train leaves. Standing on the platform, he hands her the backpack he has been carrying. She slings it over her right shoulder, letting one strap dangle free. She also has a large shopping bag, its straps cutting into her left arm. And her purse. Weighed down by all this, she looks like some sort of pack animal, bags bulging out on both sides. When he reaches over to hug her goodbye he cannot get his arms around her. Nor can she raise her arms to hug him back. They embrace tentatively, awkwardly, like crabs scuttling together, their shells in the way. This will not do. Stepping back, she slips the bags from her arms, places them carefully to one side, then comes forward to embrace him again. This time his arms encircle her waist easily, hers slide around his neck. They kiss.

Two minutes later they are still kissing, oblivious to the people passing by.

Three minutes later she is drawing back, pushing her hair back in place, bending to pick up her bags. With them safely on her shoulders again she grows casual, distant. She waits patiently while he touches his fingers to her cheek, then nods a hasty goodbye, climbs into the train, vanishes.

For a moment he considers following her. There are still seven minutes to go. He could help her settle in. But no, entering the train itself feels like an intrusion. He draws back from the door, backs up against the nearest pillar. He will just wait until the train leaves.

For a while he just stands there, whistling softly to himself, trying not to wonder why she doesn’t come out again. He checks his watch. Still five minutes left. She probably thinks he’s gone home already. He could go in, surprise her. No, that would seem too needy. Why doesn’t she come out and say goodbye? Maybe he could just walk along the side of the train, peering into the windows until he spots her. No, that’s absurd. He doesn’t want to make a scene. It would be best if she came out. It’s the least she could do, after he’s come all this way to see her off. What is she doing in there anyway?

With three minutes left to go, she finally makes an appearance. Beaming, he steps forward to meet her. They embrace once more, whisper one last goodbye. He is happy now. There are still two minutes to go but he figures he might as well leave. She’ll be okay now. No point hanging around. On the way up the platform stairs, he keeps turning to look back at her, as if to reassure himself that she’s still there. She is. She stands in the door of the coach, pressed to one side to let other passengers in, watching him until he reaches the top of the steps. Then, when he is out of sight, she goes back to her seat, settles into it with a small sigh. One minute later the train pulls out of the station.

People are so silly. People are so beautiful.

Categories: Whimsy

Lies would be more serious if one could lie about the matter in hand;
But it is an impertinence to think oneself so penetrating.
What people tell you by lies is how they would deal with this if it was true,
What they would like to make you think about this,
The fact that they think this worth repeating or inventing,
Or the fact that they will endeavour to make this true,
And, whether the external circumstances are favourable to them or not,
These are important truths, and you have been told them.

People who feel that lies make life intolerable,
That it is madness to attempt living, since people are liars,
Are like people who look at the handbook before the picture,
Are like people who wish the words of a poem to have a single meaning,
Are unable to feel safe unless they are irrelevantly informed.

Lies are the discipline of knowing that people are not you.
It is licentious not to lie to a friend.
The belief in truth leads to many untrue beliefs.
It leads to the belief that a series of earnest statements make a poem.

If one could speak the whole truth about lies one would be contradicting oneself.

– William Empson ‘I remember to have wept’

Brilliant. Keep that in mind the next time you sit down to read your morning paper.

Categories: Poetry

Propaganda n. The systematic propagation of information or ideas by an interested party, esp. in a tendentious way in order to encourage or instil a particular attitude or response. Also, the ideas, doctrines, etc., disseminated thus; the vehicle of such propagation.

The worst kind of propaganda is the kind that happens to be true.

Reading last week’s issue of the New Yorker over the weekend, I came across a story that contains extracts from letters, journal entries, etc. of US servicemen in Iraq. (The story itself is not available online, but there’s an audio-visual presentation containing extracts from it here).

Some of the stories were simply outrageous. Like the letter by Donna Kohout where she talks about how excited she is to be seeing the places she first learned about in Bible school (next time, try taking a packaged tour instead of invading someone else’s country) or Parker Gyokeres piece about the terrible living conditions and the lack of cooperation from the local people, who only listen to him when he threatens them with his gun (imagine that – you invade a country and its people refuse to wait meekly and politely in line for you to inflict your entirely illegitimate authority on them!). But the bulk of the pieces do actually invite and deserve sympathy: they are sensitive, thoughtful pieces about the very real, very human costs of war (my favourites are the ones by the medical staff – Commander E.W. Jewell’s journal from on board the U.S.N.S. Comfort and Captain L.R. Blackman’s e-mails home about the psychological scars that combat leaves).

And that, I think, is the problem. There’s a very thin line between feeling sympathy for an individual and feeling sympathy for his or her cause. And it’s very hard to maintain the clarity and insistence of abstract ethical perspectives in the face of real human suffering. How do you tell the families of those killed in the war that their sons and daughters had no business being there? That they were accessories to an unjust invasion and that sad as their deaths are, they died for a bad cause, or no cause at all, rather than for a good one?

Not that the stories are necessarily arguing causes. Jewell’s piece is explicitly critical of the leaders of the Iraq Invasion, and a number of the other pieces simply describe the horrors without passing judgement on them. Consider, for example, this bit in Ed Hrivnak’s account:

“One trooper confides in me that he witnessed some Iraqi children get run over by a convoy. He was in the convoy and they had strict orders not to stop. If a vehicle stops, it is isolated and an inviting target for a rocket-propelled grenade. He tells me that some women and children have been forced out onto the road to break up the convoys so that the Iraqi irregulars can get a clear shot. But the convoys do not stop.”

That’s horrifying. Any discussion of who’s to ‘blame’ here – the US convoys for not stopping, the Iraqi irregulars for using women and children this way, the US convoys for being there in the first place, etc. – is irrelevant. That kind of horror is a feature of war, not of the brutality of one side.

No, these stories do not try to argue for any particular point of view. They are not propaganda because they are untrue or because they are written with the intention to mislead. On the contrary, I have no doubt that they reflect nothing but absolute honesty on the part of their authors.

They are propaganda because they reflect only one side of the story. Neither heroism nor suffering, neither cruelty nor compassion is the exclusive preserve of any one side in any war. I’m willing to bet that if you repeated the exercise with accounts from members of Al-Qaeda, you’d get a similar set of moving stories, stories that would make you forget that the people writing them were terrorists. These stories are propaganda because being published in the New Yorker is a privilege available only to the US armed forces – the people of Haditha can’t and won’t get the same access, the same voice.

Last week’s issue also featured stories by Vassily Grossman and Italo Calvino – stories set during the Second World War. Reading them, and reading the pieces by the US servicemen, I couldn’t help conducting the following thought experiment: If a leading German magazine in 1940 had published accounts from the letters / journals of ordinary soldiers in the armies of the Third Reich, would they have sounded very different from the stories of those fighting in Iraq? I sincerely doubt it. Whether that makes you more apt to be sympathetic towards the average German infantryman in World War II, or more hard-hearted towards US soldiers in Iraq is a personal choice. But it’s important, I think, that we keep in mind that we can’t do one without the other. Otherwise we truly are giving into the propaganda.

P.S. Some of you are almost certainly feeling the temptation, at this point, to deliver some platitudes about how History is written by the Winner. Even assuming that’s true (though I would question how true it is of, say, Vietnam – History is written by those who control the media afterwards), it doesn’t mean we have to like it, do we?

Categories: CurrentAffairs