Eyes and ears only.

Just after I had passed my Bachelor of Commerce examination in 1956 and was planning to do post graduation by thesis, an unusual job offer came my way. A cousin of mine used to work at that time for the Central Excise Department and was attached to a factory. Its personnel officer apparently was on very good terms with him and asked him to find a young person willing to be the eyes and ears of the management. In those days, trade unions were powerful and wielded a lot of clout in collective bargaining. The new recruit was expected to work as a clerk in the dispatch department and join the Union. He would then keep his eyes and ears open and report to the personnel manager all the gory details. For his trouble, he would be paid a handsome amount in addition to his regular salary. The moral implications of being a snitch did not bother me much. In fact, I hardly even thought about them. What dissuaded me from even considering the offer was my inability to absorb and reproduce gossip. Because that’s exactly what the wannabe spy would have to do. Later on, after doing my Master of Commerce http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/09/almost-ph-d-me-who-else.html I worked for the Forward Markets Commission as a research assistant. One of the assignments I had was to visit the commodity trading markets and pick up the market gossip. I was a failure at it and was soon returned to a desk job. I did however manage to write a few good notes about the happenings in the commodity markets and my analysis of them. Gossip continues to be my Achilles’ heel even to this day. I cannot simply be bothered with it.

Sound of silence.

“And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence."
http://www.lyrics007.com/Simon%20and%20Garfunkel%20Lyrics/The%20Sound%20of%20Silence%20Lyrics.html.

That’s the third stanza of Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence, a hit release as single in 1966, made even more famous as a part of Mike Nicholas’s The Graduate soundtrack. I thought of it while reading a recent This Is London article. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23367664-details/Email+replaces+conversation+in+the+office/article.do. “Britain's offices are falling silent as email replaces conversation, according to a new study,” it tells me. The Corporate Services Group PLC, staffing specialists, found it in a poll of 2,000 office workers. “Almost half of workers admitted they email the person sitting next to them to avoid making verbal contact. Yet a nosey one in five Brits uses email just to gossip to desk buddies about work colleagues.” As for mobile phones: “A cowardly one in five Brits confessed to dropping a text to their boss instead of calling in sick.” Moreover: “… the silent culture continues with one in five employees regularly plugging themselves into mp3 players at their desks. Men are twice more likely to work to music than women, both sexes agreed the most common need for tunes was to relieve boredom at work. Yet, an anti-social one in 20 Brits confessed they listen to music purely to stop colleagues speaking to them.” If you go to office to work, is it such a bad idea that you avoid chitchat and concentrate on the job in hand? I see a lot of commuters listening to music these days in Mumbai. Nothing wrong in that, I feel, considering the ambient decibel levels. I like the sound of silence.

Meow!

Television can be such a veritable fount of new learning if you care to watch it closely. Whoever thought of calling it The Idiot Box must be a cretin surely. Take the example of this new commercial for an online employment agency. It gave me in mere thirty seconds razor-sharp insight into The New Pecking Order in Today’s Urban India. At the apex of the pyramid is what the country’s current Super Star – and all-round darling – insists on calling “hum artiste log”. This includes – once you decode the subtext – film actors, directors, music directors, classical dancers, singers, chefs, hoteliers, restaurateurs, fashion designers, jewellery designers, tarot readers, numerologists, astrologers, hair stylists and cricketers. At the base are the lower denizens such as barbers, washer men, air traffic controllers, etc. – in short, ‘non-creative’ workers. The New Order ordains the “hum artiste log” to the higher rungs of the social ladder – the priestly caste, as it were – and requires that they be rewarded in inverse proportion of what they contribute to the old-fashioned idea of the greatest common good. The media engine, including Page Three and the gossip rags, goes into an overdrive to whip up the hype to sustain this state of affairs. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, boys and girls.

Professional hazards.

Actors are such hoaxes, don’t you agree? Not their fault. It comes with the job. They’re ‘role acting’ on stage, when the cameras are rolling, even in real (not only reel) life when they talk to the gossip rags, to give just a few examples. It happens to all of us, come to think of it. See the stuff ordinary folks like you and me do on camera. Think of the way they dress when they go to watch cricket matches. Think of the way they raise their hands and sway to music in the television tamashas and call attention to themselves in the idiot-box debates. At times, one wonders if the theme line of actors from all walks of life should not be “Watch my lips”? (Excerpted from an old BBC Radio 4 program: BUSH: “Watch my nose: no new taxes.” / QUAYLE: “Er ... Mr President ... That's meant to be ‘Watch my lips’.” / BUSH: “No, Dan. If they watch my lips, they'll see that I'm lying through my teeth. Watch my nose, no new taxes.” / QUAYLE: “Er ... Mr President ... Your nose ... It's getting longer!” http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/90q3/bushl2.html.)

Literature as gossip.

Truman Capote. The Princess Diana ‘revelations’ reminded me of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, peopled by Unspoilt (and Spoilt) Monsters. "All literature is gossip," Capote reportedly told Playboy in December 1976. This is part of what I find endearing about him. He was a taleteller to the core in the best and the worst sense of the word – a raconteur as well as a gossipmonger. In fact, the advance publication of excerpts from his work-in-progress got him in trouble with a lot of his high-society friends because they didn’t like him tattling on them. Coming to the Diana prediction of her own impending death in a road accident planned by ‘X’ in a note to her butler Paul Burrell nine months in advance of the event, why did not that worthy say anything for so long? For snippets of Capote’s writing, visit the starkly designed tribute website: http://www.ansoniadesign.com/capote/. At http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s971385.htm, the new spotlight on the Princess Diana mystery is covered.

True lies. Or, whatever.

I don’t know why I just thought of the autobiography by a living journalist and author I’d read a couple of years back. It’s rather well written and eminently readable. I don’t much care for her regular columns but picked up Selective Memories: Stories From My Life on a hunch. My gut feel about books is seldom wrong. No, I’m not boasting, folks. I remember enjoying the book hugely, lapping it up in a canter even. Ms Dé seems to be in her elements here, full of erudition and shrewd insights of a seemingly somewhat reluctant celebrity bang in the fame game. By her own admission, this is not a ‘bare all, dare all’ autobiography. And, yet her sincerity and candour come shining through. At times, a tad too much. Take it for what’s it worth, folks, but I sincerely feel that all fiction, ‘faction’, autobiographical writing, history and even journalistic reporting are ultimately ‘gossip’ in the Capotesque sense. The writer tends to forget, edit, embellish, alter, slant, skew, modify the ‘truth’ – not always intentionally. ‘What really happened’ exists only in the moment. What’s reported later is hardly ‘it’, indeed can’t be – given human nature and the way memory works. In Selective Memory, I sense a recurrent theme. Ms Dé tends to ‘trace’ many of her later-life ‘mistakes’ to her father’s judgments, pronouncements and diktat (he happened to be a district magistrate early in his career) about her attitudes and behaviour as an adolescent and a young adult. Maybe, she’s right. But considering his middle-class stock of pre-independence India, he too must have suffered in plenty from the shocks her ‘unconventional’ (by his yardstick) life happened to deliver. Read an online review of the book here: http://www.mouthshut.com/readreview/5176-1.html. It doesn’t do the book or the author justice, though.

‘Celeb’ gossip of yore. (A fly-on-the-ceiling 'insider' view.)

A few weeks back, I happened to retrieve a real treasure from my pile of ancient (in Marathi ‘prachin’ or ‘puratan’ in the ‘jurassic’ sense) books. I had bought it a long time ago at the People’s Publishing House bookshop, near Flora Fountain, read it at a canter and forgotten all about it promptly. It’s a collection of printed articles in Marathi, circa 1964, offering celebrity gossip of yore convincingly supported by historical sources and/or verbatim quotes from subaltern logs (aka ‘bakhars’). The author, Yeshwant Narasimha Kelkar, seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to trowel in a heap of choicest dirt concerning historical icons of Maharashtra. Stuff like a Who’s Who of unofficial wives and paramours, for instance. It makes for racy, fluffy reading. Apart from that, Kelkar’s confident citing from various bakhars made me curious about the genre that seems to be a Marathi specially. No, that’s not true. The Marathi bakhar’s Telugu, Tamil and Sanskrit avatar is Caritra and the Persian one is Tarikh. In Sumit Guha’s authoritative and perceptive Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900 at the History Cooperative website, I learned that the genre was probably an Indianised version of the Arabic khabr (news report) or, maybe, ‘obtained or received knowledge’ – exactly the same as in the South Asian usage of khabar. Had the bakhar writers been our contemporaries, they could well have been (you guessed it!) political or high-society bloggers. The History Cooperative website is at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/109.4/guha.html.