[Reader-list] What should I do sir/madam?

[pratap pandey]

Dear Rehan A, and all,

Thank you for walking me through Bombay (i prefer that
to Mumbai, for whatever's my preference worth).

As prelude to the walk, you wrote:

"Now pratap tells us that his jamia student's fathers
> and mothers are dreaming about Pakistan. He is not
> sure what their children can dream about."

Sticking to the prelude, let me "walk" you through
what I posted.

Referring to parents of students, I wrote: "I am not
sure they are not dreaming about Pakistan".

As far as the kids who come and talk to me are
concerned, I wrote: "I don't understand their parents.
But I do understand their children."

In the context of the first clarification, the quote
from Benjamin is extremely instructive.

But not the bit about "boredom". In Benjamin, the
experience of being "bored" is part of a larger
performative game of "identity" that the Benjamite
narrator constantly seeks to create/construct, and
deny/destroy. Part of the game of reading the
"arcades" is precisely to identify yourself (the
reader) as the one who is walking ("deriving"). As a
derivist, this narrator performs its power to be able
to consistently represent that which has been seen,
visualised. The Benjamite narrator enjoys this power.
At the same time, it is uncomfortable about the
location of this power; it is uncomfortable about how
it has managed to possess this power of
representation.

The "Arcades" text therefore positions you as one
ready to be seduced into the textuality of the One who
is walking, deriving. It also defers the pleasure of
being so seduced, of the pleasure of entirely
deriving. Everytime it affords you entry into its
"matrix", it ironically signifies to you: "aha, you
are bourgeosie enough!". Or, "bored enough to walk
about in order that you know". The point is: to what
purpose?

Your walk through Bombay. "The first time I
> came to Bombay, and roamed in the Fort and Colaba
> area, I felt I was walking in the city of my
> ancestor". [You say "ancestor", and not ancestors".
I am tempted to read cathexis here! I like this
slippage, this purely typographical "error"! It is the
sign of a love, a knowing, a recognition, but not a
boredom.]

This is like the walk through Karachi, the city of my
ancestors, that I have never taken. Karachi is a city
(thanks to you) that I can imagine, precisely because
you have imagined Bombay. In fact, I can imagine both
the cities, precisely because I have never been to
either of them, but have lived for twenty years in
Calcutta.

[Should we include Lahore in this list? What about
Kipling's violent NWFP short stories, or M M Kaye?]

All of these cities display an ambition. "Karachi is
to Bombay what a potted plant is to the nursery it
came from". Cal is to Karachi is to Dhaka is to Lahore
is to Bombay is to Madras is to...no, not Delhi.

I should like to think, in the spirit of your posting,
that the ambition these cities display (and this is a
crucial word: this word has been put in by one who has
never done the fox-trot at Firpo's in Cal, recently
burnt down), or signify, is the ambition or the desire
to be read as spaces of civility.

Certainly these are spaces where you and I can
anonymously circulate, feeling civil. At the same
time, are you sure that these are not spaces where we
live (and re-live) the FANTASY of being civil? [like
the "bored" Benjaminite narrator, whose "modern"?]

Is Pakistan a fantasy of being civil, which is why I
am not sure my students' parents don't dream about it?
In this context, you have written this absolutely
fascinating sentence:

"I can tell you their dreams if their parents had
> indeed come to pakistan."

Tell me. Please tell me. Tell all of us. Maybe Kashmir
can be better understood. Gujarat, too?          

What happens if we replace the word "dreams" in your
quote from Benjamin with the word "fantasy"?

The Jamia students who talk to me are not interested
in Pakistan. They think Pakistan is a needless pain up
their asses; its a Dulcolax capsule wedged in past the
sphincters to ensure a proper crap.

At the same time, they are bewildered. They feel the
force of identifying to the notion of a "kaum", like
this MA Final student of mine from Bangladesh who has
discarded the shirts and trousers he used to wear for
an ankle-length pajama and kurta, and lace cap. The
cricketer Saeed Anwar is his latest idol (as he told
me before a paper he appeared for, and that I was an
invigilator for). In the exam hall, when he finishes a
paper, he prays over it, drawing glances from other
students who exchange glances and looks and
expressions of incredulity, who begin to giggle, and
shake their heads.

Somewhere, there is exhibited a wish to reject the
past and move on to the future. Like the
first-generation General English students I teach, and
deeply interact with. These students think that
"English" (a word they never misspell, never ever, not
in the class, not in the General English exam answer
sheet) is inseparable from being "morden", "modren",
"moder" "famus", "peeple", "poepal", "peopl",
"statoos", "walth", "welth", "goodlife".      

yours,

pp

PS: Please tell me, and all of us





 --- rehan ansari <rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Pratap, Dr Reyhan Chaudhry and others,
> 
> There was some talk earlier, with pratap and dr.
> reyhan chaudhri about english, and i found myself
> substituting "modern" for "english," throughout the
> conversation. We heard voices in our head in Karachi
> that learning English was going to make us Modern. 
> 
> Now pratap tells us that his jamia student's fathers
> and mothers are dreaming about Pakistan. He is not
> sure what their children can dream about. 
> 
> I can tell you their dreams if their parents had
> indeed come to pakistan.
> 
> I am reading a writer who says the relationship
> between those who walk the streets of a city like
> Mumbai and those who built those streets is like the
> relationship between descendants and their
> ancestors.
> Of course, I am from Karachi, but the first time I
> came to Bombay, and roamed in the Fort and Colaba
> area, I felt I was walking in the city of my
> ancestor.
> I could feel it as I turned street corners, sat in
> Irani cafes or went into a cinema. A preposterous
> idea
> grew in me even as I was engaging in ordinary, even
> boring, activity, walking in the heat, failing in
> cooling myself off with a Fanta in a café, watching
> a
> bad film at The Regal. Karachi is to Bombay what a
> potted plant is to the nursery it came from.
> 
> What madness to remember Elphinstone Street, Karachi
> when walking towards Flora Fountain from whichever
> direction! It was a slow madness, coming at me at
> the
> pace at which I was walking. At that time I blamed
> the
> afternoon heat and the boredom of my tourism.
> Everyone
> walking these streets was there because they had to.
> Just as I would not be found on the streets of
> Saddar,
> Karachi unless I had work. 
> 
> I was pursuing, more truthfully I was being pursued,
> by insanity: I felt I was back in Karachi
> encountering
> a feeling from all those years of driving through
> Saddar facades that Karachi will someday grow up.
> Or,
> that it was supposed to grow up a certain way and
> didn’t. 
> 
> The gloom of the evening. In the silhouette of
> Bombay
> University I saw my school Karachi Grammar School,
> the
> old building that has been around since 1847.
> Walking
> listlessly, the school silhouette still visible,
> past
> pavements full of books, much thumbed Harold
> Robbins,
> arcane programming books, I came across a grey
> statue,
> I had seen several in the day but had not paused to
> read the print. In a city where I knew no one, no
> one
> at all but where walking the streets brought me
> ungrounded joy, I saw the name Dadabhai Naoroji. 
> 
> This then is my ancestor! Along with the rest of the
> grey statues of Parsis the captains of commerce and
> law, responsible for these streets, and whose hand I
> could now see behind Karachi facades. Its not the
> dust
> and fallen facades of Saddar, Karachi that this
> statue
> was recalling, it was the Karachi in my mind, a city
> I
> was trained to aspire to. 
> 
> I laughed, feebly: any ustaad of Jinnah is good
> enough
> for me. 
> 
> Akbar S. Ahmed's feature film on Jinnah is not worth
> speaking about but there is a documentary he has
> produced in which there is generous use of footage
> of
> Jinnah in Bombay: his Savile Row suits, two toned
> brogues, snookeering at the club, all his friends
> Parsi, and Ratti wearing sleeveless at receptions.
> This documentary has now been shown several times on
> PTV, including on Pakistan Day 14th August. Everyone
> approves of this image of Jinnah, the posterchild of
> Muslim modernity. It is young Jinnah, modernity
> resplendent, the Savile Row image not
> old-man-Jinnah-in-a-sherwani idea that hangs in the
> disused National Assembly in Islamabad.
> 
> Ashis Nandy says the great journeys of the twentieth
> century were of the mind, but I really do think that
> for a Pakistani nothing, not even television, beats
> walking Bombay streets, stumbling across Parsi
> statues. I thought of my school, Karachi Grammar
> School, ill afforded by my parents, an establishment
> Macaulay, Naoroji and Jinnah would have approved of.
> I
> thought of my father who went to a school in Jamia
> Millia Islamia in Delhi, an other enterprise to make
> modern the Muslim boy. All of this kaleidoscoping in
> front of the suited booted statue that is father to
> Jinnah's modernity! 
> 
> I recalled Rohinton Mistry's novel's title Such a
> Long
> Journey and thought of the journey of Muslim boys
> and
> could not associate it with destinations (villages,
> cities, nations, schools, clubs, saddars, silicon
> valleys) or self transformations. I could only feel
> exhaustion. I could only associate with our journeys
> the great, a great deal of, energy expended.
> 
> I'll end with a quote from the book Arcades Project,
> by Walter Benjamin. He was walking in Paris. His
> ideas
> speak to me, with an accent.
> 
> "Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside
> with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In
> this
> fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at
> home
> then in the arabesques of its lining. But the
> sleeper
> looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he
> later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreams, he
> communicates by and large only this boredom. For who
> would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of
> time
> to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies
> nothing else. And in no other way can one deal with
> arcades structures in which we relive, as in a
> dream,
> the life of our parents and grandparents, as the
> embryo in the womb relives the life of animals.
> Existence in these spaces flows then without accent,
> like the events in a dream."
> 
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