The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: A Review

Nearly a century back two young scholars from Oxford University, B P Grenfell and A S Hunt set out to excavate a site on the banks of the Nile in Egypt at a time when the tensions between the French and the British over the status of Egypt was particularly acute. Napoleon had already discovered the antiquities of Egypt and had published them in 11 volumes and Joseph Champollion had read the Rosetta's stone thereby unlocking the secrets of Egypt's past. Just at a time when the pursuit of archaeology was changing from a mere collection of antiquities, a la Indiana Jones variety, to a more scientific and systematic analysis of the material remains of the past,the explorers stumbled upon a small village with a Greek name Oxyrhynchos, which roughly translates as the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish. Here were discovered a treasure trove of documents written on papyri and in the dry desert climate the documents survived for more than 2 thousand years opening the doors to the study not only of Egypt's past but also that of Greek, Latin, Arab and Byzantine literature. For preserved in the desert sands were literally mountains of documents and in the hands of a dedicated team of historians these documents have come to life and along with inscriptions and coins the documents from this site have become the mainstay of ancient history.
A fascinating book has recently been published based on a study of this site. Peter Parsons, a scholar who worked on the site for nearly 50 years has brought out an eminently readable account of the recovery, decipherment and publication of the papyri found at the site. Called City of the Sharp Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World book is a treat to read. This book demonstrates the dedication with which the early pioneers of the discipline of studying ancient documents went about their task. River fever, long bouts of loneliness,physical attacks,a morose work force and a obstructive Cairo administration were only some of the difficulties they faced. Even in the first season of excavation such treasures as a few lost poems of Sappho, odes of Pindar and Horace were found and this discovery along with a second century collection entitled Sayings of Jesus spurred the public interest in the project. Parsons has given us a delightful book.

The Political Fallout of the Nuclear Deal: Instability and opportunism

The vampanthis, true to form, went on threatening and threatening the UPA Government of Manmohan Singh, but did little to destabilise it or even bring down the Government as they promised to do. The time the Congress Government was out on bail furnished by the vampanthis since August of last year, the congressmen as every petty criminal; out on bail is wont to do, just jumped bail and the vampanthis are left standing with filth all over their faces. The other day Veerappa Moily was on NDTV saying very badly that "we have the numbers" meaning the UPA regime can survive with the outside support of the Samajwadi Party headed by the Mulayam-Amar Singh duo. Had the vampanthis brought down the government in November itself when the SP spoke out against the Nuclear Deal, the credibility of the vampanthis would have been quite high. Now even if they bring a vote of no-confidence against the UPA regime, it is unlikely to have any immediate impact. Maybe this was the game plan right from the beginning. We will make ideologically charged and pro China based threats and you use the interim time period to organise support for yourself. The vampanthis have shown that they are indeed a "LOYAL OPPOSITION" to the dynasty obsessed Congress party.Enter the Samajwadi Party: A party that is all but wiped out, like the Congress, in the major state of Uttar Pradesh. Suddenly the two parties have discovered the virtues of "secularism" and this ever green fig leaf for every opportunistic alliance was once again invoked by the rajput chieftain, Amar Singh. He has even forgotten, quite unlike rajputs, the insult heaped on him by the queen bee of the Congress Pary, Soniaji. How long this alliance of mutual convenience will last is any body's guess. Mulayam Singh betrayed his friends in the UNPA to join forces with the discredited Congress and he and his party will pay dearly in the coming elections. He will certainly get the heads of Chidambaram and Murli Deoria as the price for extending support. Already there are signs of the Congress regime helping their new partner. Amar Singhji is known to be close to Anil Ambani and in the feud between the two sons of Dirubhai Ambani--Mukeh and Anil--the SP is clearly on the side of Anil. So the Congress regime obliges Amar Singji by launching its customs directorate at Mukesh and the 2 planes HE IMPORTED. IT IS SUCH VINDICTIVE USE OF OFFICIAL machinery that will increase due to the unholy opportunistic alliance at New Delhi.In the elections that will follow all these shenanigans will tell on the performance of the parties in the UPA. Congress will see a drastic fall in numbers and in Tamil Nadu, the DMK regime will bite the electoral dust. Pawar's NP is already cosying up to the Shiv Sena and in New Delhi the Congress will certainly lose power. All this does not mean that the BJP will sweep to power: it just means that it has a chance of becoming the single largest party and must prepare for power.

DASAAVATARAM MUST BE BANNED

A few years back the whole of the Islamic world was in a fury over the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses more recently over the publication of certain cartoons. We have been saying and I repeat that argument again that artistic freedom does not mean disrespecting the beliefs of others. Unfortunately the so called educated classes in India have internalised an obsolete idea first enunciated by the English and later converted into an article of faith by the conservative secular bandwagon that to insult and humiliate the traditional ethos of India is a virtue and a sign of advanced thinking. If the likes of Karunanidhi should give a certificate of excellence to a movie like Kamla Hassan's Dasavataram then we have reasons to be worried, because Karunanidhi has made it his life mission to be anti Indian and anti non Saivite religious deities. Karunanidhi in his long life has never once critisized the hook swinging ritual that now DMK cardres are encouraged to perform, but he is in the forefront in every attack on Vaishnava deities. He has no right to denigrate a religion that he does not understand or follow. Kamala Hassan has won the admiration of the children of EVR by launching an attack on Hindu religion and he has even appropriated the concept of avatar, the dasaavatar of Sri Vaishnava religion in order to attack Hinduism.The film just released portrays Hindu religion in a bad light and has to be banned. Unfortunately the crowds that pay the money to see this movie do not realise that such movies are made in order to cater to the political classes. Will anyone tolerate a false depiction of the religions of the book. Hinduism has become open game and anyone can trample over it in the name of secularism. I am sure this third rate movie will win all national awards and will be India's entry to next years Oscar. The White countries also like such lopsided depictions of India's religions because it make that violent religion of Christianity look good. Did not the Christians fight each other for centuries, even in the last century they slaughtered the Jews. Are not Shias and Sunnis not fighting each other today. Why blow out of proportion a small episode in the history of twelfth and thirteenth century South India.This movie must be banned

Casablanca: AN Eternal Classic

Humphery Bogard and Ingrid Bergman in their classic roles in the war time movie Casablanca played roles that have seldom,if ever been surpassed. What makes this movie just a great film. The editing is spotty. For instance, the famous scene in the Railway station at Paris and when it is raining hard and Richard is dripping wet and by the time he enters the train in the very next scene his dress is dry. It is obvious that the director has overlooked this point. The dialogues are cliche ridden. Is that the sound of cannon fire or is it my heart pounding. This line spoken by Ingrid Bergman is as cliche ridden as most of the other dialogues; Of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world she walks into mine;this line uttered by Eric Blaine is just mushy sentimentalism. In spite of the obvious flaws there is something immensely grand about the movie.I regard the corrupt police officer, Claude Rains who plays Captain Renault as the real hero of the movie. He admits that he is a poor corrupt official but maintains a warm and exceptionally largehearted relationship with everyone. The poor girl from Bulgaria who does not have the money to bribe herself to an exit visa is helped by Renault. In the end when he could have had Rick arrested for the murder of the German officer Major Strasser, Renault allows Rick to escape saying: Major Strasser has been shot:Round up the usual suspects. Rightly, it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I wonder why no novelist has ever thought of a sequel to Casablanca. The most wooden and by far the faceless character of in the movie is Victor Lazlo. He is self righteous, loves a woman who obviously does not love him,and tries to use his heavy hand to get Rick to part with the letters of transit. I think it would have been great if Bergman and Bogard had stayed behind in Casablanca.

Simon Schama: Rough Crossings: A Review

Historians like to tell stories, true stories that spring from the materials that have survives from the past. Putting the events together in a seamless web of narrative involves great intellectual and physical effort. And when you read a really good historical work based on exhaustive archival research you get the feeling of drifting into another world altogether. That is why someone said:The past is a foreign country. The twentieth century has seen a number of great historians: Fernand Braudel,Lawrence Stone, Bernard Bailyn, Theodore Mommsen and Simon Schama. Of these Theodore Mommsen won the Nobel Prize and still remains the only historian so honored. He was a historian of the Roman Empire who shifted the focus of research from the Empire to the Provinces. He wrote in a polished and sophisticated style that probably was considered literary by the Literature Committee of the Alfred Nobel Foundation. Thomas Mann was also a good writer and his son Golo Mann has certainly inherited his father's gift for words. The stories that historians tell about the past are regarded as true stories because the characters spring from a whole skein of written and unwritten evidence, not testimony. Unfortunately is a moment of self destruction probably even of self delusion, historians began neglecting the basic features of the craft in favor of abstractions like "models" "causation" "hypotheses" personification of historical epochs as "feudal" "capitalist" etc.The result was a general impoverishment of the art of history writing. Then came Hayden White who even said that history is only a "construct" like any other discourse.The sad state of affairs did not last long. Historians soon realised that a discipline that has been around for nearly 3000 years cannot be swept aside from the intellectual heritage of mankind. The craft of writing history not only involves a commitment to truth, no matter how elusive it may be but also the ability to write in a style free from the vacuous jargon that clutters the pages of several journals. One historian who has stood apart is Simon Schama.Trained in the University of Cambridge Simon Schama teaches at tColumbia University. He is the author of Landscape and Memory and Embarrassment of Riches.He has just published another excellent book, Rough Crossings.The American War of Independence is usually seen as a gigantic struggle against oppression and an epic saga of liberty and freedom. This patriotic interpretation cannot be cynically set aside for the simple reason that all the participants in that struggle, Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin were all influenced by the dominant intellectual ideas of the time that we now collectively call the Enlightenment. Yet the principle of human equality was not present in the minds of those patriots and leads to an obvious paradox: The Americans fought for their freedom and the Slaves in the US at that time fought on the side of the British. This point is ably brought out by Simon Schama in this book. After the defeat of the English and after the surrender of Cornwallis many of the slaves who fought on the side of the British escaped to Nova Scotia in Canada. In fact conservative English judges who were called upon to deliver judgement on the status of slaves who escaped in British ports ususally set them free while liberal ideologues were less forthright in accepting the theory of mono genesis. Simon Schama has documented in great detail the lives of several slaves who faught and died in the American War of Independence.It is a tragic fact of history that the triumph of the rebels meant postponing the freedom of the African American population. This book is worth reading.

Orhan Pamuk and his evocative novels

Turkey is located geographically right in the middle of two great continents, Europe that lies west of the Straits of Bosporus's and the vast Asian lands to the east. Such a location is not without its obvious difficulties, a cultural confusion noted right from the days of Herodotus is only one obvious problem. Turkey aspires to join the European Union and as such has to meet certain exacting standards of human rights, judicial due process, political and intellectual freedom etc. This bill of political freedoms in an Islamic country itself is an anomaly. And yet Turkey in spite of rising time of Islamic fundamentalism and even al Qaeda inspired terrorism has proved to be a stable and vibrant society. The Nobel Prize for literature has gone to a Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk who seems to represent both the grand historical past of the Ottomans and the contemporary angst in his writings. Most critics would argue that Orhan Pamuk is a post modernist in that he experiments with different structures of time and narrative in his novels. We can even speculate about Pamuk's questioning of the Turkish identity of present day Turkey. He has won my admiration for the courage he displayed in publicly calling upon the Turkish state to acknowledge the Armenian Massacre that took place in the first decade of the 20Th century.Pamuk unlike western liberals who blame Islam for all the ills of present day society. He denounces quite vehemently all those who preach islamophobia in the name of spreading democracy. I will quote a passage from his writings to illustrate the point;It is neither Islam nor even poverty itself that engenders support for terrorists whose ferocity and ingenuity are unprecedented in human history; it is, rather, the crushing humiliation that has infected Third World countries. And for this the west has to be held responsible because it has failed to comprehend the shame and the humiliation that has fallen on the poorer nations. Hot-headed military operations and war swill only take us away from the order of peace.This sentence sums up all that is wrong with the policy of powerful nations against Islamic countries. Pamuk has spoken strongly in favor of intellectual and cultural freedom in Turkey and was even prosecuted for the crime of insulting "Turkish Identity". He regards the writers primary objective as being the unpacking of all that a culture refuses to talk about. A clinical examination of the sites of silence in any given society. Politics of civil liberty and unrelenting questioning of the staus quo are the credo of Pamuk's writing.His writing is aimed at the so called public sphere constituting civil society and he does believe strongly in the tranformative nature of good writing.The book that I enjoyed the most was one of Pamuk's earliest novels, My Name is Red.It is set in the dark days of the Ottoman Empire when Istanbul was the cultural capital of ASIA.The novel attempts an exploration of the subjective world through the experiences of a range of characters,Stork, Butterfly, Olive and Esther.The miniaturist and his world are etched out in a manner that suggests that Pamuk is quite familiar with the mentalities approach of the French Annalist es.

A Prisoner of Birth: A REVIEW

A few days back I wrote that I watched Jeffery Archer, the well known writer and conservative Party MP on T V and was impressed with his performance. I bought a copy of A Prisoner of Birth and the first few pages were a delight to read. However as I passed the halfway mark I began to suspect an elaborate con job on the reader. The plot is so unrealistic, almost crude, direct ripoff from Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.I may agree that Danny was innocent of the original crime for which he was convicted, but by taking on the identity of Nick and impersonating the murdered Scottish lord, Danny commits a series of petty frauds like impersonation, forgery, misusing the credits cards etc. All these crimes cumulatively add up to More than 20 years in prison.

The transformation of Danny from an illiterate Cockney boy to a authentic Scottish nobleman in just 2 years is utterly unrealistic.

The book has its moments of charm, but such moments are few and far between.