The BS Column: Darwin's Savage Reviewers

(Published in the Business Standard, November 24, 2009)

On this day, one hundred and fifty years ago, the publishing house of John Murray brought out a condensed and abridged treatise on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in a first printing of 1,250 copies.

The author, Charles Darwin, was delighted when John Murray ordered a second printing of 3,000 copies in the wake of public demand, and when the first printing in the United States of America ran to 2,500 copies. He considered this tremendously successful for a scientific work on the then obscure field that would become known as evolutionary biology. Over the next 150 years, Origin of Species would become one of the most widely read, reprinted and discussed works in the history of science.

Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection have had a massive influence on almost every aspect of contemporary thought. Companies and governments alike often abuse the principle of survival of the fittest. The emphasis on the evolution from man from other species has led animal rights thinkers to the argument that we will, eventually, have to cede non-human species more respect and rights than we are currently willing to offer. And Darwin’s exploration of mating practices in the animal kingdom as part of sexual selection influences a slew of dating games and tactics. It’s incredibly difficult, if you’re a thinking person in the 21st century, to try and imagine a world where we didn’t take the principles of evolution for granted.

Except in one field, where the opposition to Darwin’s The Origin of Species has always been fierce—religion. In the wake of the publication of Origin, the Church found itself split. The Bishop of Oxford came out fiercely against Darwin’s theory of evolution, as did the Church of England faction in general; but liberal Christians were able to support Darwin’s ideas.

Darwin followed these debates with great emotion, complaining bitterly against one reviewer: “But the manner in which he drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base.” A few lines later, he was more composed, thanking his friend J D Hooker for his support: “You have cockered me up to that extent, that I now feel I can face a score of savage Reviewers.”

And he has them still, a century and a half after The Origin of Species came out. In that time, there has been little scientific refutation of Darwin’s theories. But opposition to evolution comes from three unlikely, ill-assorted groups. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness is a valiant opponent of Darwinism, if the least influential of his critics today. ISCKON’s The Darwin Delusion draws from Intelligent Design rather than classic creationism to make its arguments. Author Lalithanatha Dasa says, “Darwinism is, more than anything else, the singular cause of atheism in our time.”

Creationism in its current US avatar is a well-funded and influential movement. Schools of creationist thought vary widely, but the basic text is the Book of Genesis, and in the creationist view, the timeline of human evolution is drawn from the Bible. (This seems to lead, as far as the newly established Creationist Museum demonstrates, to an obssession with dinosaurs and the belief that they were still walking the earth long after the fossil record would indicate possible, but that’s another story.)

Where US creationism has been most successful is in the challenging of the teaching of evolution in schools, and in its demand that creationism be taught alongside—preferably as an equally established scientific theory, despite the complete lack of scientific proof, but at any rate as a valid belief system. The debate over mixing science with religion is an ongoing, fierce, take-no-prisoners one, and it has had far-reaching effects on the equally ferocious free speech and censorship debate.

Though they have little else in common, the Genesis-inspired creationists and the burgeoning school of Islamic creationists are united in their hatred of Darwin. In bookstores in Turkey (and New Delhi’s Nizamuddin), you can find entire shelves devoted to theories of Islamic creationist belief. Harun Yahya/ Adnan Okhtar, the man who has written the 800-page standard text on Islamic creationism, is a fascinating figure. Condensed, Yahya’s views are that the world may well have been created billions of years ago, but that the creatures in it exist in the same form that they were originally created, by God. (There is a rather magnificent comparison between Darwinists and the wicked Pharaohs of Egypt, a must-read on Yahya’s website.)

If the first 150 years of the theory of evolution saw a battle between the Church and Darwinists, accompanied by growing acceptance of Darwin’s ideas among the scientific establishment, the next 50 years is likely to see a broader battle, between religious dogma and science, censorship and free speech. The power of Darwin’s theories can be seen, to a great extent, in the ferocity of the resistance currently being offered to them. Reason and scientific proof may yet win the day, but this is in some senses a very medieval, 21st century war.

Book review: The Museum of Innocence

(Published in Mail Today, November 2009)

The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber
POUINDS 12.99, 536 pages
ISBN 978-0-571-23699-2

“What I am trying to explain,” Orhan Pamuk wrote in Istanbul (2005), “is the huzun (melancholy) of an entire city, of Istanbul.”

Pamuk, the most celebrated of Turkey’s writers, has had to carve out an unusual path in his decades of writing. Unlike his contemporaries in Turkey, he gives himself the freedom to see his country with a clear, unsparing eye. Unlike writers from the West, he must explain the culture his writing is steeped in. Instead of explaining Istanbul or Turkey, though, he reinvents and reimagines this world for an audience that could just as well be sitting in Istanbul’s cafes as Europe’s salons, or India’s metropolises.

The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s first novel after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, is ostensibly about love and obsession. It’s also an evocation of huzun, a meditation on the attractions and uses of melancholy.

“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” There is a precision to this moment, as there is to the rest of Kemal’s story—it happens “on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three”, as he enters his lover from behind, and nothing in his life will ever be the same again. Kemal is rich, successful, on the brink of the perfect marriage to Sibel, a girl from a similarly privileged Istanbullu family, and what will change his life is the oldest story in the world—his love for Fusun, a shopgirl, and a distant relative from an impoverished branch of Kemal’s family.

If this sounds like the storyline of a Turkish—or an Indian—melodrama, Pamuk sets up the echo deliberately. The Museum of Innocence is a straightforward tale of desire and obsession; an unusual form for the master of the baroque plot to choose, almost a reversion to the early 21st century Marquezian or Nabokovian explorations of the topography of love. Fusun and Kemal occupy the no-man’s-land between the conventional demands of Istanbul society, and its yearning for the beguiling but dangerous freedom of the individual promised by the West.

The definition of love Pamuk offers in The Museum of Innocence is “deep attention” blended with “deep compassion”; Kemal’s obsession with Fusun is a function of the painful, acutely focused attention he finds himself compelled to offer--as with lovers down the ages, for no good reason. Rendered impotent with his fiancee, he retreats, Sibel by his side, from the round of parties and opulent amusements that govern their “insular, intimate” circle, but the relationship ends; Fusun marries someone else; and Kemal spends eight years at the edges of her life, a guest at her family’s very middle-class dining table, a possible source of funds for the film she wants to make and star in, a casual but committed drunk.

Released from the glittering but airless world of crumbling privilege he was born into, Kemal discovers the vivid and corrupt world of Turkey’s film-makers, who aspire to make art films, sometimes make melodramas, and must usually survive by making or dubbing soft porn films. By the 400th page, the reader knows that this tale will have a conventional, dramatic twist; and Pamuk delivers as expected.

It’s a conventional storyline, but what lifts The Museum of Innocence into the realm of the classic is Pamuk’s understanding of the frailty of love, and the fierce effort needed to maintain it.

Rising up alongside the figure of the lovers is the ghost of Istanbul, a city struggling to be remembered, known, familiar, mired in its own melancholy, reaching for change even as it holds on to the sexual and social shibboleths of the past. And Kemal’s closest kin are not other lovers, but the obsessive collectors of Istanbul, whose homes fill up with the accumulated memorabilia of a city just as he allows the many rooms of his life to be filled with shrines to a love often consummated but never possessed. The last chapter is turned over to the figure of Orhan Pamuk, allowing the writer to make a cameo appearance in his work.

The Istanbul he evokes is familiar to readers of his previous work, and The Museum of Innocence is as much a tribute to its lost, forgotten icons as it is to the power of first love. Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda, Meltem; a floral batiste handkerchief folded carefully by Fusun; a modified Nisantasi map of Istanbul; tombala sets and salt-shakers, New Year’s lottery tickets, china dogs, 4,213 of Fusun’s cigarette butts, bottles of Altun Damla cologne, everything that might be found in the locked glass cabinets of a well-off Istanbullu’s home.

The Museum of Innocence is not Pamuk’s most ambitious work, but it is his most evocative. And Pamuk retains his ability to surprise, even within the bounds of convention. Three-fourths through his lushly told but straightforward narrative, Pamuk reaches Chapter 69, where every sentence, for four pages, begins with the word ‘Sometimes’. The young Pamuk would have felt the need to exhibit his literary exuberance throughout the book; the older Pamuk allows himself this one flourish, and then lets us meditate again on why there are no museums to the human heart, except for the one that he has built in these pages.

(For a much more detailed review and overview of Pamuk's work, read Pico Iyer's long essay, Secret Love in the Lost City. And visit Pamuk's real-life Museum of Innocence--it's beautiful.)

The BS Column: The Man Who Would Map the Mind

(Published on November 15, 2009, in the Business Standard)

Only the steady tide of readers overflowing into the aisles of the Gulmohar Hall indicated that this was not just another book discussion at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s lecture drew students, fellow neurologists and inquiring readers in such numbers that we could easily have filled the nearby Stein Auditorium.

The neurologist and author was here to deliver the inaugural Charles Darwin lecture, though his speech was not marked by the high excitement that attended a similar event in 1860 at a meeting of the British Association at Oxford. That debate, on Darwin’s recently published Origin of the Species, saw an epic clash between Bishop Wilberforce and T H Huxley. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote: “The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the excitement increased as others spoke.”

Wilberforce is said to have asked Huxley if he claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother—the actual words are in doubt. Huxley’s famous response was that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected to any man who used his gifts to obscure the truth.

No ladies fainted during Professor Ramachandran’s speech in Delhi, or during his earlier presentation at the TED India conference, though there was much applause and laughter. The author of Phantoms in the Brain, The Emerging Mind and The Man with the Phantom Twin is as accomplished a speaker as he is a writer, with a simultaneous gift for humour and clarity. Ramachandran has loyal followers (and readers) around the world in part because he passes the Stephen Jay Gould test.

The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “I have fiercely maintained one personal rule in all my so-called "popular" writing. I believe-­as Galileo did when he wrote his two greatest works as dialogues in Italian rather than didactic treatises in Latin, as Thomas Henry Huxley did when he composed his masterful prose free from jargon, as Darwin did when he published all his books for general audiences­ that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested lay people. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people."

Ramachandran shares Gould’s passion for clarity, and his belief that even the more complex reaches of science are not beyond the grasp of the average intelligent lay person. He led us rapidly through his explorations of the philosophy behind the workings of the brain, but what was of particular interest was his discussion of mirror neurons.

In 2000, Edge carried a paper by Ramachandran that has proved to be one of the most influential works of its kind: ‘Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution.’ He dubs mirror neurons “Dalai Lama neurons”, or “empathy neurons”—these are cells that fire both when a person acts, or observes an action performed by someone else. Ramachandran’s research led him to a succinct and breathtaking hypothesis: “The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others.” Going a step further, he suggests that there might be rational and neurological, rather than religious, grounds for ethics.

From his 2000 and 2006 research, Ramachandran’s inquiring mind has already moved further. He ran out of time and couldn’t go on to discuss his next obsession: the possibility of “multiple minds” in a single brain, the idea that your sense of your self might be even more subjective than you realize. If we are “nothing but a pack of neurons”, and if the brain produces our individual versions of reality, why not explore this possibility further? Would you be willing to upload your “self” into cyberspace, would you be willing to be a brain in a (presumably well-maintained) vat, if that allowed you to “be a combination of Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity”?

As Ramachandran shifted gears, citing the Upanishads and Advaita philosophies of the self and consciousness with as much ease as he referred to the latest research on autism, I was not alone in my sense of awe. Ramachandran and his colleagues have a long way to go before they can prove their hypotheses, but if they succeed, they will change the way we think about individuality, consciousness and the self forever.

The last time we had such a shift in human thought was in November 1859, when the publisher John Murray brought out the first 1,250 copies of On the Origin of Species and Natural Selection. I’m guessing that within the next two decades, those of us who were present in that small auditorium in Delhi will look back at Ramachandran’s talk on consciousness with a sense of having been present at the making of history. Few readers could ask for more from a literary evening.

The BS Column: Civil Lines, Redux

(Published in the Business Standard, November 10, 2009)

“Civil Lines hopes to appear irregularly, twice a year for a start.” Among the many promises this magazine of “fine unpublished writing connected with India” made and kept, the first part of their opening manifesto was religiously adhered to. It is only now that the best of Civil Lines has been collected in Written For Ever (Penguin India), some 16 years after the magazine’s birth.

The first issue of Civil Lines came out in 1994; between that date and 2001, the magazine took on a mythical aura, assisted by the fact that Civil Lines sightings and basilisk sightings occurred at roughly the same frequency. The cover photographs by Sanjeev Saith became as iconic as the contents between the covers.

It’s easy for any literary magazine to make an impact with its first issue, and in this case, the first issue was an absolute gem. Edited by the late, formidable Dharma Kumar, the late and equally redoubtable publisher Ravi Dayal, Mukul Kesavan, Ivan Hutnik and Rukun Advani, it included work by I Allan Sealy, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Radha Kumar, Ramachandra Guha, Bill Aitken and Khushwant Singh. Alongside this embarrassment of riches came a prescient warning: “The length and content of future numbers are as uncertain as the periodicity; we’ll play it by ear.”

Civil Lines is notorious for its elusiveness--five issues between 1994 and 2001, followed by an eight-year-long silence. (There will, however, be a Civil Lines 6: the contract was signed while I was still at the publishing house Tranquebar.)

Readers have consoled themselves with the reflection that Civil Lines shares its somewhat erratic tendencies with some of our finest Indian writers and thinkers, who seem unnaturally disinclined towards actual publication. But for those of us who have—and incessantly talk about, much to the annoyance of those who don’t—the complete collection of those five slender volumes, Civil Lines evokes a rare admiration.

It’s not just the roster of names who were published by Civil Lines, or the fact that many of them became names (or became much bigger names) post-publication: the editors, with their collective knowledge of the Indian intellectual circuit, had a knack for spotting emerging talent just before it became established talent.

Some, like Manjula Padmanabhan, Raj Kamal Jha, Ruchir Joshi, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Suketu Mehta and Allan Sealy, were evolving into the writers they are today. Some, like Radha Kumar, Bill Aitken, Sonia Jabbar and Tenzing Sonam, are well-known for their work in other fields, and add the label of “professional writer” to a host of other achievements. Some, like Dilip Simeon, first gave notice of brilliant work to come in the pages of Civil Lines—Simeon’s novel, expected out soon, grew out of the incredibly incisive and funny ‘OK TATA: Mobiloil Change and World Revolution’.

To establish a literary magazine where the first issue is a collector’s item is commonplace; to establish a literary magazine where every issue is a collector’s item is extraordinary. Civil Lines found its identity from the first issue onwards. In comparison, even the New Yorker shuffled uneasily in its first decade between being a vehicle for humorous writing and an arena for news of interest to a metropolitan audience. (The New Yorker, however, came out with admirable, even monotonous, regularity.)

Civil Lines was shifty about its stated manifesto: issue one commits itself only to “fine unpublished writing”. Civil Lines 2 admitted: “’First-rate writing’ is a good intention, not a usable manifesto,” and then stubbornly refused to set down a manifesto of any kind. Civil Lines 3 helpfully pointed out thematic links: trucks seemed promising, relatives were in abundance, and the editors continued bravely, “Then there are animals.”

Civil Lines 4 eschewed a manifesto in favour of a poem, the delectable ‘Tonguing Mother’: “When words float free of local reference/ writing happens in a fog/ of deference.” And Civil Lines 5 drew our attention to the fact that it advertises itself as ‘New Writing From India’: “This,” said the editors with what one couldn’t help feeling was perverse glee, “is misleading.”

In many ways, Civil Lines mirrors the successes and failures of the wider world of Indian writing in English. Here, in its five volumes, is the brilliance, self-referential wit and passionate engagement of some of the best of our writers. The magazine’s appearances may have been erratic, but the editors, with Kai Friese joining their ranks, displayed a virtue unusual in Indian literary circles—quality control.

And it’s significant that the silence from Civil Lines is mirrored by a decade of uncertainty in Indian writing in English—more writers have been writing to the marketplace, rather than for themselves, in the last decade than ever before. It is perhaps too much to expect that Civil Lines 6 will herald a return to the glory years when the magazine was an annual affair, but I would be content to see the magazine reach Civil Lines 10 before—well, let’s say 2030 to be on the safe side.

Ved Mehta: The time traveller's life

(Published in the Business Standard, November 7, 2009. Images taken from www.vedmehta.com)


Indian writing has little space for the family album. The few portraits of parents, siblings or partners that emerge are like the photographs that hang in our homes: officially posed, formally garlanded. Ved Mehta’s Continents of Exile series is one of our few, monumental exceptions, a long-playing biography on the screens of our imaginations.

He’s in Delhi for the re-release of the eleven books that make up the series, written over decades, starting with Daddyji and continuing through Mummyji and Mamaji into the personal terrain of All For Love and Red Letters.

Nothing is exempt from Mehta’s need to set it all down, not the years of apprenticeship with Mr Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor, not his blindness, not his sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch. This has its pitfalls, as Ben Yagoda noted in About Town, a history of the New Yorker: “Ved Mehta’s endless biographies of the various members of his family almost seemed to dare the reader to say, “This is boring!” and flip ahead to the next article.”

Mehta, one of the great raconteurs in person, knows this; he also knows that Continents of Exile cannot be ignored. “When my three-part essay on Mamaji came out, other New Yorker writers asked why Mr Shawn would run this, at a time when people were dying in Vietnam,” he says. Shawn had his own reasons for shaping and encouraging Mehta’s personal and painful brand of honesty.



*******



“I hate the word ‘memoir’,” says Ved Mehta, after I’ve used it for the fifth time. “I prefer biography, or autobiography.” We’re discussing the Indian reluctance to write in the autobiographical vein. My theory is that there are too many unspoken taboos on writing about the personal, the familial. Ved’s hands flicker in disagreement, like an unconscious turning of a page to a different chapter.

“Indians aren’t reticent,” he says. “Maybe we still have a Victorian morality that won’t let us speak our minds. But there’s a freedom in the West you don’t have here. Writers there are not afraid of not making a living. They have the freedom to write about sex. The freedom not to appear dignified, noble, likeable. What would Henry Miller have written if he’d wanted to be liked by his middle-class relatives?”

I think of my impatience as an adolescent reading Mehta’s “endless biographies”, wading through these meandering accounts of parents, relatives, lovers, friends, editors, partners. It was years later before I realised how deeply embedded Mehta’s portraits had become in my mind, as though his family had become mine, as though I knew Kiltykins and Daddyji as well as he did. It took years to see how tight, how taut — Mehta’s adjectives, not mine — the narrative was; how much had been skillfully omitted, how accurate the details were.

Mehta would give the credit to Shawn: “He was a genius, and he also had enormous taste, sympathy and humanity. These sound like abstractions, but they are not.” The preferred adjectives to describe good writing today are “necessary” and “honest”; but as Mehta expands on Shawn’s virtues, they seem like the Holy Trinity of truly timeless writing, including Mehta’s own work. Taste, sympathy; humanity.

*******

How reliable is memory anyway? Here are three Ved Mehta stories. The Neemrana festival gathered together some of India’s greatest writers— V S Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Khushwant Singh and Ved Mehta among others — and then, for inexplicable reasons, sequestered them in a fort-palace far away from their readers.

The insistent literariness of the Neemrana festival was enlivened by a massive disagreement between the wife of the German ambassador and Naipaul. The author and the ambassador’s wife threatened, from opposite corners of the fort, to leave if the other stayed on; the combined diplomacy of Pico Iyer, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Nadira Naipaul finally persuaded a still-furious Naipaul to come down to dinner.

Ved Mehta walks in late. For once, his normally acute senses fail to compensate for his blindness, and he sees only Vikram Seth and Dom Moraes, not Naipaul. “Dom,” says Ved in his clear, carrying voice, “you’ll never guess what that terrible old man has gone and done now.”

“No, no,” says Mehta, though he’s smiling. “That didn’t happen.” He has, he explains, often had to deny stories about himself.

The late Dom Moraes and he once made the same trip, and wrote separate accounts. Dom had a wonderful story about Ved Mehta as the guest of a maharana, drawn to the lifelike figure of a stuffed tiger. “May I pet it?” he asks, and the maharana gives his permission, while Dom signals frantically — but ineffectively, since Mehta can’t see him-from the other end of the room. Ved, petting the stuffed animal, is remarking on the realistic feel of its fur when the tiger gets up, yawns and walks away.

“Dom,” says Mehta with some feeling, “treated me as Quixote treated Sancho Panza. I never rode horses. The maharana never introduced naked ladies into my bedroom. And the stuffed tiger story isn’t true.” I have a clear memory of Dom telling the story in his rich timbre, and Mehta and I both agree that some stories, however false, should be true.

The third story concerns Mehta’s blindness, which he has often written about, commenting that it is for the blind to imagine the world of the sighted — the sighted rarely feel compelled to do the opposite. One of Mehta’s readers, noting the many references in his writing to “seeing” and “scrutiny” or specific colours, particular details, is convinced that Ved Mehta is not really blind. At a book launch, the reader decides to prove his theory.

Ved Mehta is speaking to a group of friends. The reader sneaks up and joins the group; then makes a rapid hand gesture in front of Ved’s face. The writer continues with his tale. The reader tries a more obvious gesture; the writer is unmoved. The reader, still convinced that Mehta’s faking, starts waving his hands in front of the writer’s face, jumping up and down. The writer remains impassive. Defeated, the reader leaves, and tells a friend who’s witnessed the incident that he was wrong, that Ved Mehta is, indeed, blind.

“That wasn’t Ved Mehta,” says the friend. “That was V S Naipaul.”

This story is true.



*******



The conversation has roamed from the short attention span of the modern-day reader to the relative merits of Joyce versus D H Lawrence to a dispute over whether it was alcohol or buggery that fuelled the productivity of Truman Capote. (“Buggery,” says Mehta, and that settles the matter.)

There is one final matter to be addressed. “I never started out wanting to write a million words about my life,” says Ved Mehta, and we both contemplate what it would have been like, in 1972, to look ahead at a vista of writing biography all the way up to 2003. I cannot imagine it, any more than he could, as a young writer. “Writing is in itself a way of growing up; the more difficult the challenges you take on, the more you change.”

Continents of Exile is balanced by the other books — travelogues, political accounts, short stories — but perhaps Ved Mehta knows that his biographies will define him. There is an end to a novel, even a trilogy; but an autobiography can only end with an obituary, which we will hope is long delayed. However inadvertently he began the project of writing his life, the million-plus words it’s taken to cover his history, Ved Mehta has hit upon the only possible answer to writer’s block. Writing your life as you live it is the perfect way to ensure that you will never run out of material.

(Also read: Jai Arjun's excellent profile of Ved Mehta, carried in Tehelka.)

Food column: Sliced baboon for breakfast?

(Published in the Business Standard,
November 7, 2009)

The UK restaurant critic A A Gill is as well known for his acerbic outrageousness as for his (formidable) knowledge of food, but even he couldn’t have predicted the storm he would create with what will go down in history as the “baboon confession”. In his Sunday Times review of The Luxe, Gill served up an unforgettable opening line: “I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch.”
Outrage followed, with readers flaying Gill for his vivid description of how he blew the creature’s lungs out, and for his confession that he did it to “get a sense of what it would be like to kill someone, a stranger”. Unusually for Gill, though, he may have committed a minor error. He writes: “There is no mitigation. Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard.”

Some months before Gill blew his baboon away, though, a group of South African farmers were lobbying for permission to open the world’s first licensed baboon abattoir. Animal rights groups have successfully blocked the plans for the abattoir — baboons are uncomfortably close to humans in terms of their facial expressions, and most of us have a visceral discomfort when it comes to killing any of the ape family. The understanding that apes, monkeys and baboons can feel pain and fear is inescapable, given their closeness as a species to humanity itself.

The farmers had specific plans for marketing baboon meat —tinned according to old bush recipes, and in the form of salami. Given that Friar Labat records an 18th century recipe made with donkey meat, wild boar meat and the meat of the domestic pig blended together, baboon salami isn’t that much of a stretch.

In the same week of Gill’s baboon confession, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer touched off an ongoing debate with his book, Eating Animals. Foer doesn’t mention baboons, specifically, but he does ask an age-old question: why do we draw the line at eating dogs? Given that Gill spends much of his life as a food critic eating dead animals, is it really that reprehensible that he would then go out and shoot one? Would his baboon-killing have been more justifiable if he had subsequently cooked and eaten the primate?

Foer’s book shows much of the zeal of the newly-converted vegetarian, but he does offer new ways of looking at the increasingly vexed question of whether we can morally justify eating meat. (Full disclosure: I’m a lapsed vegetarian, who lost the taste-versus-ethics argument some years ago.) Foer has a cunning addition to the usual arsenal of reasons to go vegetarian: his research into factory-farmed meat, which accounts for most of the meat eaten in the US, demonstrates a strong and convincing link between bad holding and slaughter practices and the spread of numerous human diseases. To summarise his arguments: eating meat can’t be justified morally, and if the ethics of eating meat doesn’t bother you, consider the fact that it might make you sick.

Foer addresses cultural discomfort brilliantly: few cultures can afford to take a long, hard look at what’s on their plate, and why, whether that’s organic vegetables or pesticide-laden fruits, meat or tofu substitutes. The difference between the tables of the rich and the poor, between abundance and scarcity, the many food taboos balanced against the sensual pleasures of the palate, the cruelty of killing versus the widespread acceptability of animal slaughter — to look closely at your plate is an act of moral courage that is beyond most of us.

I think that’s also what’s missing from Eating Animals: the understanding that for most of us leading already-rushed lives, making increasingly complex decisions about everything from water conservation to child-rearing, we would prefer not to examine what goes into our bodies too closely. Between Gill’s gunslinger act and Foer’s compassionate but persistent inquiry, they might force us to look again at why we eat meat — and to accept that there’s a deep inconsistency between deploring the killing of a baboon while we order another portion of butter chicken or fish fry.

The BS Column: Asterix at 50

(Published in the Business Standard, 3 November, 2009)

The year is 50 BC, and all Gaul is occupied. All, except for one indomitable village, and by Toutatis, its inmates have maintained their grip on our hearts and minds even though we’re awash in a sea of neo-Disney comic book characters.

Fifty years after the team of Uderzo and Goscinny created their version of the Odd Couple—Asterix the Gaul and his large friend Obelix the menhir-delivery man, with Dogmatix tagging along—the appeal of that little Gaulish village is a curious one. The Western comic book world is overrun with spin-offs from the TV and film worlds, and the most successful series seem to depend, like the mind-numbingly tedious adventures of Scooby-Doo, on the endless repetition of a familiar theme. For groups as diverse as Pixar, Disney, Marvel and DC, comics are an efficient merchandise-delivery system; and Uderzo, who survived Goscinny, appears to be phlegmatic at the idea that the Asterix franchise will go the same way.

For almost five decades, though, as all comic book territory was steadily occupied, the Asterix series offered a tiny pocket of resistance, a dollop of magic potion in the weak broth of mediocrity that threatened to drown comic books worldwide. From the very first issue of Asterix the Gaul, which appeared in Pilote magazine, Uderzo & Goscinny had intended Asterix to stand bravely against the “I came, I saw, I conquered” wave of sameness that rolled out across the world of comic books. The first Asterix introduced some of the characters who would become staples—Getafix, the druid, whose name had to be changed to Magimix in the US because (quelle horreur!) there might otherwise be the suspicion that Uderzo and Goscinny were in favour of drug use. (What, exactly, went into that cauldron of magic potion anyway?)

As Unhygienix the fishmonger and his wife Bacteria, Geriatrix the ancient warrior, Vitalstatistix, the village chief who feared nothing except for the falling of the sky on his head and his wife Impedimenta, and Cacofonix, the village bard with the dulcet voice of a cat in heat, made themselves part of our lives, they carried a little bit of the cultural resistance of France with them.

The thumping of Romans, from Magnumopus to Tremensdelirius and Infirmofpurpus, that accompanied Obelix’s joyous forays into the wider world, the celebration of wild boar against le hamburger, the gentle fun had at the expense of the amusing tribe of Englishmen—these were all part of an attempt to pretend that there might, just, be intelligent life outside the Disney universe. Where else could one find an entire comics book series in the 21st century that ignores the existence of America? Except in Asterix and the Great Crossing, where the Gaulish reaction to North America is to attempt to leave it as soon as possible.

The Indian fondness for Asterix remained a mystery to me for years, until Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge revealed in an interview that they had chosen to weave a certain kind of public school English into their translations of Asterix from French to English. This generation of English-speaking Indians prefers a more robust, home-grown flavour to the language, but a previous generation had different and distinct preferences—we liked our English birthed by the BBC, consecrated by Kipling and baptized with a sprinkling of P G Wodehouse and Frank Richards. The richness of the puns in Asterix—especially with the names of characters, from Tragicomix—the dashing, handsome, ever-so-slightly ridiculous husband of Panacea; the Latin-English quips and the catchphrases (“These Romans are crazy”) draws from this tradition, and it’s a dying one.

Over the years, Asterix has had its share of controversy. Uderzo & Goscinny were gleeful in their perpetuation of racist stereotypes—the English had bad teeth and liked their food boiled with mint sauce, the Spanish are hot-blooded and tempestuous, the Germans are humourless and martial. As the series wore on, the exuberance of some of the best comics gave way to a more formulaic approach, especially after the death of Goscinny.

Like Tintin, Asterix came close to being claimed by gay rights groups as one of their own: his closest friendship is with Obelix, he’s a lifelong bachelor. But their relationship is closer to the literary friendship between Holmes and Watson, manly, even misogynistic, but not quite gay enough, then to the more ambiguous Haddock-Tintin friendship. Asterix does fall in love, and Obelix has a crush on Mrs Geriatrix, making them a less obviously gay couple.

But it is impossible to be too critical, or too cynical, of the exuberant and nostalgic world of the Gauls, where Romans tiptoe through the forests, a druid ladles out magic potion to the villagers, Dogmatix cries when a tree is uprooted, Mrs Geriatrix undulates so expressively, and a thin Gaul and a fat Gaul go tramping off in search of adventure. The sky would have to fall on my head before I stopped reading these books, however old-fashioned they may become as the decades pass.