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The opening section is a long and fascinating "affair"
with the game of cricket, and he has packed these pages with all
manner of statistics, jokes, yarns and cricketese. From
the legendary Don Bradman down to our inimitable Sachin, he
brings out the magic of the game played by 22 "flannelled
fools at the wicket." (Quote: Kipling). There is virtually
nothing that his pen has left untouched, and he laces the
discourse with lavish quotations from the writers on this
bewitching game. The ‘mystique’ is unfolded leaf by leaf,
and the reader is charmed into a secular ‘beatitude,’ if
that is the way to put it. To quote his favourite author P.G.
Wodehouse who himself worshipped the game to the point of
idolatry, here is one example. "Anthony," writes the
superb comedian, "would have forgotten Cleopatra if he had
had the chance of batting against Grigson." And TGV adds,
"Here’s God’s plenty, vintage Wodehouse`85."
In the section
devoted to his second ‘love’—cinema, appropriately
entitled From Kiss Kiss to Bang Bang, his amazing
knowledge of Hollywood and Bollywood classics, of the secret
lives and loves of the Oscar celebrities enriches the celluloid
lore. Marilyn Monroe, "the blonde goddess’s" bedroom
intimacies with the great American President John F. Kennedy is
one story he fastens upon. For, indeed, TGV himself had a
life-long "crush" on that darling of "the silver
screen." And he could cite her "vital statistics"
down to her tail and toes, for his vicarious, voyeuristic
romance was absolute, unabashed. Brought up on the Tamil cinema,
he had feasted his eyes on the lissom, playful beauties of the
South, and that’s where his song of celluloid fantasies
started, in the first instance.
In the next
section under the rubric of The Romance of English Prose,
we see him in his element, for his own concern for the health of
Queen’s English, and for its multiple beauties could only be
styled as infatuation with that language. Starting with his
favourite "writers’ writer," V. S. Naipaul whose
diatribes against the countries and cultures of the developing
nations, and against the preceding Nobel Laureates from Campus
and Patrick White to Chinua Achebe, and to one of the best
prose-writer`A7 in the English tongue, George Orwell, do not
seem to TGV as something uncalled for, almost distasteful.
It appears to me
that while the Knighted Trinidadian `E9migr`E9 writer was
justifiably agonised our India’s "areas of darkness"—animal
poverty, sleaze and graft, dirt and disease, etc.—he, like so
many Western visitors failed to see that "Eternal
India" which had already become "a state of mind"
and a place of nirvana for such writers as Emerson and
Whitman, Hermann Hesse and E.F. Forster. Naipaul’s chilly
cerebration proves a ‘block’ in his vision, and he is unable
to feel the pulse of that India which is struggling to become
modern. Naipaul, indeed, makes fun of India’s writers and
intellectuals, ridiculing the "second-rateness " and
their "mimicry." The essay called The Romance of
English Prose is, of course, a prize piece, and it
celebrates "the humble English essay" denied the front
parlour in the comity of letters, a piece that "held a
pride of place" in his canon. We also have in this section,
a couple of extremely erudite essays including the one on the
German philosopher, Wittgenstein.
In the fourth
section, The Indian Approach to Psychoanalysis, a
masterly long essay entitled, Authority and Identity in India,
he sings paeans to Sudhir Kakar and sees the complex issue of
India’s identity through the darkened glasses of the ‘Indian
guru’ of erotica. He endorses Kakar’s view that there was a
need to move away from the Western Freudian idea of the
"Oedipai Complex" to the Indian mother’s ‘fixation’
on her sons. The superficialities and glibness of some cultured
pundits irk both Kakar and TGV. E. M. Forster’s question:
whether India is a mystery or a muddle, is not addressed
directly, though the sibylline charm of subliminal India is
recognised. Similarly, Indian myths are seen as vast metaphors
which, generally speaking, remain outside of the line of Western
vision. It’s an ambitious essay, and requires a close critical
scrutiny.
In the fifth
section, Umbrella Days, we see Tamil culture and
Brahmanical lore analysed, both with irony and indulgence. For
instance, the humble umbrella draws out TGV’s witty muses to
the full. Again, in The Stainless Steel Culture, he shows
a penetrating picture of the South Indian female psyche, and its
erotic ‘fixation’ on the steel utensils. The fondling of
polished kitchenware almost amounts to an "orgasm," a
consummation achieved. "The indiscriminate use of
tubelights and stainless steel," says TGV, "amounts to
cultural degeneration." In the essay, The Making of a
Scientist, he pays a handsome tribute to Brahminical
intellect which produced such Nobel Laureates as C.V. Raman and
his nephew, S. Chandrasekhar. But in a stray reference to
Sikhism, he remarks that this religion has reached a point where
to reform it is to hurt its essence. However, his praise for
Bhindranwale is inexplicable. In fact, a provocative article on
Hitler in the Deccan Herald had, at one time, caused a
fierce controversy. He was, we learn, allergic to politics per
se. And I’m surprised that a scholar of this order couldn’t
understand politics in its widest sense. "In our
times," wrote the German novelist, Thomas Mann, "the
destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms."
The concluding
section carries a bouquet of tributes to this writer of
scintillating prose, and the five contributors include the
present Hindu editor, Nirmala Lakshman, Ashish and Uma
Nandy, Sudhir Kakar and a couple of old students. These pieces,
then, remain a wreath and a requiem for a writer whose ashes,
immersed in some holy river, now set up a song, proclaiming his nirvana.
William Hazlitt, the celebrated essayist is reported to have
said, there’s not a line in his work that "licks the
dust." Well, TGV belongs in such high company, if you like.
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