Bear your Cross with pride.

The other day, while wading through a plethora of gifts bestowed on us on various occasions and stored away in our steel cupboard, I came across a Cross Select Tip Rolling Ball Pen with a rich brown enameled body, rather handsomely boxed. As I took it out to admire it, it triggered a memory. I’m backtracking to the late seventies and early eighties. I was working in Everest Advertising as a writer and enjoying a rather long spell of success. http://digbig.com/4yqay. This agency was run on feudal lines with many fiefdoms operating under an overlord. From time to time, durbar used to be held and favours bestowed on the deserving underlings among whom I happened to figure. One Diwali, I was among the select coterie to receive from the Overlord’s second-in-command under the benign gaze of the King-Emperor a golden Cross Ball Pen, a much coveted status symbols for executives. I was quite thrilled to get it although I did most of my writing on a typewriter. http://digbig.com/4yqba. Being absent-minded, I managed to lose my Cross soon enough and was much castigated by friends, well-wishers and associates for being so careless and uncaring.

19 Gramercy Park.

233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html where I grew up – and spent fifty three years of my life – had neither the glamour nor the grandeur nor the opulence nor the august lineage of owners of the 37-room, 18,000 square-foot mansion in New York (19 Gramercy Park) at the southeast corner of 20th Street and Irving Place, directly overlooking Gramercy Park. Here’s where Ben Sonnenberg, also born in 1936 like me, grew up. According to an architectural report at http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/GRP002.htm 19 Gramercy Park was built by a Whig politician in 1845. It was later owned by the Stuyvesant Fish family and, from1945 on, by the legendary “flack” (the father of modern PR and spin doctoring for which, according to his son, he was “scandalously well paid” by Philip Morris, Pan Am, Pepsodent, Texaco and Sperry-Rand among others) Benjamin Sonnenberg. This Russian Jew who came to New York from Brest-Litovsk in 1905 when he was just four turned into the most ardent capitalist. It was he who combined 19 Gramercy Park with the six-story apartment building next door at Number Twenty after evicting the tenants, the pacifist socialist leader and Socialist Party Presidential candidate in 1940, 1944 and 1948, Norman Thomas, among them. (Interestingly, Thomas also happened to be also a Conscientious Objector to the Great War which he thought was an "immoral, senseless struggle among rival imperialisms". His brother shared his views and went to prison for resisting the draft. By contrast, Ben dodged the draft by joining the “Company” as his handler called the CIA.) Both Ben and his father led what can be succinctly described as bizarre, make-believe lives. Ben confesses to hating his father. They spent time with each other taking long walks in the neighbourhood since the time Ben was ten till he was in his thirties. Apart from that, Benjamin joined from time to time the self-exiled Ben who was busy running up his debts and running down his trust fund in Cold War Europe of the fifties. The reasons for Ben’s hatred were never spelt out clearly. Benjamin paid most of Ben’s extravagant bills admonishing him from time to time like any normal father. Benjamin’s only fault seemed to be that he was overbearing and over acquisitive, a Collector, which made Ben “a Collector’s Child”. Both father and son quoted widely from various authors. On various occasions, Ben claimed to be living apposite roles of characters from exotic novels. A weird but fascinating tale of the listless and pointless life Ben led with too much happening to him too soon including the CIA and multiple sclerosis is what Lost Property by Ben Sonnenberg is all about. P.S.: In retrospect, it did remind me of Truman Capote's unfinished novel, Answered Prayers especially because of so many NHRN (Not His/Her Real Name) characters strewn all over it as also a "rootless, intelligent and detached" raconteur like Ben was once described by an ex-CIA operative whose name he promptly forgot after using his swimming pool for an entire summer. Ben wrote his memoirs with uncomparable grace, extreme economy and delicious irony - and sometimes lobbing at you obscure words like "banausic" (= merely mechanical or routine) and "emulously" (= with a desire to emulate or competitively) - and refusing to explain them.

Eyes only. Art advice and addresses. Priceless!

My friend, Sanat Surti, is sure to appreciate this post. For art connoisseurs, here’s Raymond Mortimer’s advice on the art of seeing (The French Pictures: A Letter to Harriet, c. 1932) and a list of art websites, both gratis. Mortimer explains how an artist ‘sees’ and how art lovers should look at paintings: “A painter … goes on being surprised. He … can see objects divorced for the moment from their purpose, origin, and meaning. He sees like a man blind from birth who suddenly recovers his sight. It would be the most thrilling experience to spend one day seeing the world as Claude or Renoir saw it.” Next the list of URLS as promised: Monet mfa.org Vincent Van Gogh vangoghgallery.com Camille Pissarro personal.umich.edu Auguste Renoir renoir.org.yu Paul Cézanne ibiblio.org. Who was Raymond Mortimer? Good question. He was a British writer, critic and literary editor whose full name was Charles Raymond Mortimer Bell. He also worked for the Foreign Office and wrote fiction while living in Paris in the twenties. http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/mortimer/.

Are Page Three lions inveterate lady killers?

If you write well, does it automatically make you a lady killer? The case of Salman Rushdie makes me want to almost believe in the heresy. Also, my limited experience as a fairly successful copywriter supports the theory. Somehow, people associate word conjuring with magic. Then, they hypnotize themselves into believing that the wielder of such arcane power must be a Pied Piper to the opposite sex. Sex appeal is to the mind of the believer what beauty is to the eye of the beholder, after all. The Page Three coverage of the Rushdie goings-on when he was last in Bombay (not Mumbai – not even when pronounced “Moom-baa-ee” in the FM deejay style) threw up some unwittingly tongue-in-cheek revelations. I wondered, for instance, what hardbound first editions (of Rushdie, I take it – and already autographed!) “strategically placed in the dining area” were meant to be doing at an intimate dinner in his honour (as the fly-on-the-ceiling report put it). Were they doubling as first edition coasters, pray tell? Or, were they a sly dry run for the secret Christie innovation, The Supper Auction – inspired by, I suspect, The Supper Theatre? Also, the intriguing reference to Padmalakshmi (who one report described as “draped around” Rushdie at the same do) complaining to Dé: “I hardly get to spend time with my boyfriend”. Dé added: “The boyfriend smiles indulgently.” Was the indulgence, his fawning hagiographer never clarified, aimed at her girlish tendency to tell little white lies so blatantly? Or, at the fact of the life lived on Page Three that he was the reigning Lion King in Bombay’s Page Three jungle and Padmalakshmi didn’t get ‘it’ (neither the attention nor the point)? And, while Bombay and Madras (not Chennai) had to be satisfied with Rushdie and Padmalakshmi, New Delhi had a galaxy of NRIs and POIOs attending a mega confab and being regaled by the President himself. In the honour list was Shashi Tharoor, senior UN official and author of the then ‘just published’ Nehru, The Invention of India. Nehru was fond of big dams to build which the Indian State callously reduced to penury farmers and Adivasis who had little or no land and banished them from the Indian mainstream. Now globalisation and consumerism have further reinforced the process. The identity equation of today reads: “I consume. Therefore, I am.” Ironic, isn’t it? (P.S.: It’s good to know that the marginalized of the world now have the World Social Forum speaking on their behalf.) http://www.shashitharoor.com/books/nehru.