The Abba Interview 2014

Abba  enjoying Diggi Palace chai with the Glamorous Nomad on opening day

At sunset, I sat down with Abba on our balcony overlooking the Trivandrum zoo to catch up with her travels and her recent experience at the Jaipur Literature Festival. I first asked Abba what she’d been up to since our interview of almost a year ago. “I’m no longer unemployed, and I’m no longer living with my parents, although I enjoyed that (some). After leaving Jaipur last year, I went to Cameroon and visited my family there. I spent the summer living in New York City. Now, I’m living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where my I’m CDC fellow in the field epidemiology training program.”

I asked Abba was like to live in Addis Ababa. She replied, “It has its pros and cons. Pros include a temperate climate (although I do like a little warmer). There are a lot of great restaurants with a good deal of variety in the cuisines offered. The people are nice and it’s generally safe. Also, there are a variety of different cultural centers. On the downside, the traffic can be a problem.

I asked Abba to compare her current experience in Addis Ababa with her earlier experiences living in Africa. She said, “When I lived in Cameroon, it was a small town so that was very different. Dakar (Senegal) is comparable to Addis Ababa. Bamako was lower key. In many ways, Addis Abba is most like Dakar.”

I asked about her experience with the program and Ethiopia. “The students in the program really appreciate the training and seem to enjoy our teaching style. The students are very enthusiastic about the teachers and as learners. The purpose of the program is to build capacity and eventually that it will become self-sustaining.”

About Ethiopia in general, Abba remarked that she’d been told it was unique, but she doesn’t see it as especially different. She noted that Africa is diverse, so that doesn’t distinguish Ethiopia especially. Abba did say she loved the food and that has been a real highlight. The people are friendly, but not as open, at least around Addis Ababa. It’s also harder out in the hinterland because they speak only Amharic, unlike the more widely spoken English within Addis Ababa. 

I turned Abba’s attention to attending her second Jaipur literature Festival and asked for her comments. “It was a real treat.” As a result of what she saw and heard, she bought 12 new books, and she has in mind a number of others. “All of this serves to reinvigorate my reading and really whets my appetite and creates a passion for literature based on what I experienced in Jaipur.” She also noted that the setting of the festival is quite beautiful. On the downside, she didn’t find as many great sessions as she found last year, although she attributed that primarily to the different topics on the schedule this year.

As to highlights, she rated the discussion between Gloria Steinem and Rachida Gupta as exceptional. Abba said their conversation served as a reminder that change comes from the bottom up, and change takes time, so supporters of change shouldn’t stop just because change seems to be coming too slowly. Ms. Steinem recommended shared parenting, that the boys and girls be raised more alike, and that the most important choice a woman can make is a good partner. Steinem reminded the audience that we should share our truths and that those who are more inclined to listen should speak up more, and those more inclined to talk should listen.

Abba reported that she didn’t do much advance reading this year for the festival, although she did do some. As far as panels go, she preferred those sessions with only two or three people because larger panels tended to meander more and some participants dominated the discussion. Abba was disappointed not to have heard more from Ved Mehta on the panel session she heard with him. She remarked that she was now reading one of his books and that he was a new author that she discovered courtesy of JLF.

When asked about her favorite food at the palace, she cited the thin crust pizza.

I asked Abba for her advice to any future JLF attendees and she remarked, “Come prepared”. She recommended that you review the schedule and choose your priorities among the sessions. Be prepared to stand, and if you can, come with others and work in teams. Finally, she recommended that you come with partially empty suitcases, because you’ll buy a number of books that you’ll want to take home.

I asked for her recommendations and she gave me four:

1.       Goat Days by Benyamin. She enjoyed it very much.

2.      Mukiwa by Peter Godwin (about Zimbabwe).

3.      Books by Ved Mehta.

4.      Ghana Must Go by Taiye Salasi. 

Abba reported she didn’t have any special issues with any of the presenters at the festival. 

Finally, I asked, about Jaipur and her return there. She reported enjoying Jaipur because of its good shops and good eating-places. She remarked that the weather was a bit chilly, but she was used to that from Ethiopia. Likewise, the traffic was even a little more hectic than Ethiopia, but tolerable.

From last year, her favorite author was Manu Joseph, and last year’s program help bring around her reading to this year’s program.

#JLF Retrospective Pt 3: Antony Beevor, History, and Nonfiction

I enjoyed hearing Antony Beevor speak on three different occasions at JLF. This allowed me a reprieve of sorts because, despite his acclaim as a historian, I hadn't read any of his books. Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 had stared at me for ages from the shelves of Prairie Lights, but for one reason or another, neither had made it into my bag. Here in Trivandrum, The Second World War is available, but its so big and fat that I thought it would crowd out other pre-JLF reading.








Now, post-JLF, I've embarked on his D-Day: The Battle for

Normandy, and I'm finding out why he's received such acclaim. At page 152, I'm just beginning the chapter "Securing the Beachheads", but I have a good sense of how the book works. Beevor moves up and down the chain of command from Roosevelt and Churchill dealing with the prickly Charles DeGaulle, to  Ike's decision to proceed in 6 June despite the uncertainty of the weather, to the reactions and actions of the men in battle. War brings out extremes in humans from the base and cruel to the brave, gallant, and the kind. Even only 152 pages in, one can see how operations fail to go according to plan and how some plans prove very poorly considered. Donald Rumsfield infamously said that "you go to war with the Army you have", and one must grudgingly admit some truth to that, but you'd expect more forethought and care than what too often seems to have been the case with this invasion, such as soldiers and paratroopers weighed down by excessive gear and gliders made of plywood that would splinter upon a hard landing (sometimes impaling their occupants). Beevor weaves in and out from "the pornography of war" to its heroism and to its banality while maintaining a strong sense of story.

At JLF, Beevor had a session to himself at which he gave a talk that amounted to a synopsis of his most recent book, The Second World War entitled "Global War 1937-1945". Beevor starts his narrative with the full Japanese invasion of China in 1937, which he argues marks the opening of the war, not the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Beginning with the invasion of China, events unfold in varied and often unpredicatable ways. Casualities arising from this conflict that involved so much of the globe, impossible to know with certainty, were staggering by any calculation. While certainly not equally distributed, war crimes abounded on all sides. Beevor noted distinctions between national fighting forces as well as within national forces. For instance, he identified the U.S. Army as "slow" in the South Pacific  while the U.S. Marines were "aggressive". Finally, he defended the use of the atomic bomb against Japan given the casualites that the Allies (primarily the Americans) feared from an invasion of the Japanese mainland, estimated at a half a million, with a potential of civilian casualties in the range of two to eight million.

In response to questions, Beevor knew of no evidence that the U.S. proceeded to use the atomic bomb against Japan in order to intimidate Stalin. He also noted the racial and ethnic hatred during the war, much of it the result of propaganda, which made the war that much more barbaric as one saw on the Eastern Front, the Holocaust, and in attitudes of U.S. troops toward the Japanese. Finally, he opined that history is a branch of literature, to which I say "amen".

I heard Beevor speak on a couple of panels as well. In the "Nonfiction Renaissance" panel, with Beevor, William Dalrymple, Geoff Dyer, and Reza Aslan, listeners enjoyed some interesting comments. Dalrymple argued that storytelling (narrative) had been the primary vehicle of history writing from the time of Herodotus, but that in the era following World War II, history had moved away from narrative. However, the publication of Simon Schama's Citizens, about the French Revolution, marked a return to narrative. Dalrymple also noted the continuing popularity of "historical fiction". Panel member Reza Aslan suggested that the ability to "humanize" figures (referring particularly to his recent work on Jesus) was a key, but that nonfiction must remain "tethered" to reality, as readers have an expectation of fidelity to the truth. Beevor noted that nonfiction now uses techniques of novels to describe what the world was like in a very different time.

Someone had the good sense to ask the panelists for a favorite or especailly good work of nonfiction that they would recommend. Their answers:

1. Geoff Dyer: Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
2. Antony Beevor: Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time for Gifts. (I encountered Mr. Beevor in the waiting line at the men's room and thanked him for validating my choice of a favorite read in 2013, to which he responded that he had some bias as Fermor had helped him during his career and that his wife had written Fermor's biography. I suggested that the recommendation was no less valid for the biases.)
3. William Dalrymple, noting that Beevor had selected Fermor, made recommendations in three fields: for travel, Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia; for history, Steven Runciman's The Fall of Constantinople 1453; and for journalism, Truman Capote's "Hardcarved Coffins" (which has been criticized as containing fabrications by the author). 

In the "Literature of War and Revolution", Beevor described conflict, such as war and revolution, as the basis of all drama and issues of moral choice. Indicative of this insight is the work of Vassily Grossman, the Soviet writer who chronicled the experience of the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II in his novel Life and Faith (the title an homage to War and Peace). Only by good fortune do we have this book, as the KGB arrested Grossman after he sent the manuscript to a publisher. The Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov stated that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years, but a forgotten copy of the manuscript was smuggled to the West after Grossman's death and his masterpiece was published. Grossman had the temerity (insight) to see that Stalin's Communist regime and Hitler's Nazi regime were mirror images of one another.

Beevor's own most successful book is Stalingrad, the tale of the epic battle on the Eastern Front. Beevor reported that his publisher thought that they might be able to sell 5,000 copies. Winner of the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (books published in English in the U.K.) and the Woofson Prize (for history published in English for a general audience by a U.K. author), it has now sold around 2 million copies. No doubt a pleasant surprise for Mr. Beevor and his publisher. The Glorious Nomad purchased a copy of this, and I'm eager to hear her report.

JLF Retrospective Pt 2: Amartya Sen, A Living National Treasure

JLF keynoter Amartya Sen

After hearing from Amartya Sen twice on the opening day of JLF, I tweeted that India ought to declare him a living national treasure, as the Japanese do for some of its greatest artists and thinkers. I wasn’t kidding. Of course, there could be a down side to such an act, as he seems now on permanent loan the U.S. as a professor at Harvard (and take that, Cambridge!), and perhaps he’d be called back to India full time. In any event, he’s a cosmopolitan man and a real gem. He comes across as humble, generous, humorous, and brilliant. In his keynote address, he imagined a conversation with the “goddess of medium things” to ask seven wishes for India. I’ll share my notes about those wishes below. Indians and the rest of the world would do well to keep them constantly in mind:

1.      Sen asks for a renewed concern for classical education and the humanities. In his interview during a later session, this Nobel prize-winning economist told his audience that he studied Sanskrit and mathematics in college. If you read a book like The Argumentative Indian, his collection of essays about India, you appreciate his knowledge of India that extends back into the classical era. Against this, India is awash in engineers and IT guys without such grounding. A new balance is needed. Sen mentioned that Tagore (whose school Sen attended) emphasized the need for science education. Now the positions are reversed. By the way, I’ll make the same wish for America and the rest of the world.

2.      Sen wishes for a pro-business party on the right that is not associated with communalism (which we Americans would consider a religious or ethnic party). While not mentioned by name, he probably was thinking of the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party that scares non-Hindu Indians (and there are millions of them, mostly Muslim). But like the Republican Party in the U.S., it is an amalgam of business interests and voters who believe that they can advance only if someone else gets trampled upon. In the U.S., white men tend to vote Republican although Republican policies favor plutocrats over working people. So, again, I’ll take Sen’s wish to the U.S. with me.

3.      Sen wishes for a stronger party on the Left, one genuinely concerned for the severely deprived (millions in India) and not chasing the boogieman of “American imperialism”. I got a good chuckle out of this comment, as I believe that he was making an oblique reference to The (Khodograbe) Arrest. More than one commentator about that affair noted that the old guard in India still wants to man the barricades with the old Marxist rhetoric of anti-imperialism. The young, I think, look upon this as so much nonsense, although as with many of the young, you can expect a strong nationalist streak. In any event, the really poor should be the concern of the Left according to Sen. I say ditto for the U.S. If the Democrats have any concern for the poor (and they do have—some, they are ahead of the Republicans, but that’s not saying much at all. Both the Left  in India and  Democrats in the U.S. are too beholden to wealthy donors and middle-class interests to do what’s really best for the really poor, but Sen’s next suggestion addresses this problem.

4.      Sen wishes for a better media. The media must overcome its reluctance to investigate and reveal abuses that strike close established interests, such as subsidies for petroleum and electricity that mainly benefit the wealthy and middle-class and that do little for the really poor. The really poor don’t have access or much use for electricity or much in the way of petroleum. The media conveniently ignores these abuses of the public purse. Sen wants to see subsidies ended and funds directed to health care, immunizations, infrastructure, and other public goods. Sen suggests that funds are best spent for better schools, better higher education, toilets for all, and gender equality, among other things. While economic growth has allowed some improvements in each of these areas, economic growth without a political sector that provides for public goods will fail to allow for the improvement of everyone’s life. For models, Sen suggests that India look to the East Asians (whom, I must say, have left India behind).

5.      Sen asks for an end to the criminalization of homosexuality, a vestige of mid-19^th century British attitudes. (Here is one area in which the U.S. has made some very real gains and seems well underway to ending this discrimination.) \

6.      Sen asks for an improvement in the political culture of India and a better recognition of issues. He, like many, is heartened that corruption has become a political issue. Improved governance is a good that needs reinforcement and that can aid in many other causes, such as the eradication of polio and improvements in the condition of women.

7.      Sen requests that India become less “defeatist”. I would say “fatalist”, but the intention is the same. Far too often I perceive that Indians take a “what’ya gonna do?” attitude. But I believe—and hope—that demonstrations  and elections in Delhi and elsewhere about corruption and the abuse of women indicate a new activism that might lead India to address its many failures of governance. Of course, we in the U.S. take too much for granted, and for every “gov’ment can’t do nothing right” yahoo in the U.S. I meet, I’d like to bring them to India and say:  “Here’s what it looks like with little or no effective government”. What unreconstructed Indian lefties and American anti-government types don’t ponder enough is why Indians emigrate to the U.S. (and U.K. and Australia) and not vice versa. It’s all a package, and right now Indian’s package of opportunities and goods remains far short of that of the U.S. and even China. However, if India grants Amartya Sen his seven wishes—as only Indians and not the goddess can—then watch out, India could stand astride the world stage. 

The more that I think about it, maybe somebody should wise-up and invite Amartya Sen to make seven wishes for America, where he now lives (part-time) and teaches. We, too, could use a dose of his good advice.

Jaipur Literature Festival 2014 Retrospective Pt 1

Fun for the whole family: cool, cloudy weather doesn't dampen our spirits as we enter JLF on Day 1

C, the Glamorous Nomad, Abbas, and I returned to Jaipur over a week ago to see old friends and attend the literature festival. What a treat! I'll do a bit of a retrospective and commentary about the festival over the next few posts, but first, a few words about Jaipur, our home last year.

Upon arriving in Jaipur, C and I felt a pang of nostalgia. Compared to TRV, it's a much livelier, more interesting city. We also have many friends in Jaipur that gave us a rather active social life, while in TRV we've fewer contacts. Part of the explanation seems to be the people and part of it our circumstances, such as living in a high-rise versus the Jaipur Heritage House, my lack of a local work place, and so on. But I perceive that the people of the north are more outgoing and their English-speaking ability no less than that of those living in the south (suggestions by northerners to the contrary notwithstanding). I find the food in the north more varied and interesting, and I've even developed a soft spot for Hindi compared to Malayalam. To my ear, Malayalam seems an absolutely incomprehensible mouth full of syllables and soft consonants spoken as if the speaker is in a race to the end of a seeming endless stream of syllables. (Do you know how long it's taken me to learn to say "Thiruvananthapuram"?)

Of course, Jaipur still has its downsides. The traffic remains utterly chaotic and noisy. The "honk every three seconds" rule remains in effect. I noted that after the hard rain, the storm sewers and parts of the recently paved road (in honor of a Sonia Gandhi visit) were collapsing. I'm certain that when the motorcycles take to the sidewalks during rush hour as they do each night, several riders would flip over the tops of their cycles when they hit the holes created by the cave-ins. Nobody seems to care about much about the maintenance of infrastructure. The mass transit line is closer to completion, but friends told us  that it wouldn't open until after the election this spring. Of course.

Finally, I must comment on the weather. When we left Jaipur last June, it was--quite literally--110 in the shade. Certainly, last winter temperatures dropped, sometimes into the 30's overnight, which made our unheated apartment amazingly cold. It rained a couple of times overnight, and we had one early morning hailstorm. But each day the sun came out and warmed us up.

Not so this year. The weather was for the most part cloudy and cool, with only intermittent rays of sunshine at the Festival. On the final day, an early morning downpour flooded a couple of outdoor venues. Organizers were forced to transform Char Bargh from a 400-seat venue to about a 40-seat venue. Everyone trooped on, but to say the rains dampened spirits is a cliché that just seems too apropos. During the opening session of the final day, English novelist Jim Crace said he felt right at home with persons straggling in to avoid the rain and cold regardless of the topic. The bookstore, in a tent, was closed the final day. Fortunately, we'd been through our book-buying frenzy before then, so we didn't have to leave any titles behind that we simply had to have. We had enough in overage baggage charges as it was, but some may not have been so lucky.

Our China and Africa experts, a/k/a The Glamorous Nomad & Abbas, warm up with some delicious Diggi Palace chai

Despite the weather, the Festival was again a success. The attendees were enthusiastic and the presenters for the most part quite lively and knowledgeable. I was again impressed by the young Indians who attended in large numbers and asked questions and made comments. Sometimes India strikes me as so slow and cumbersome and out of date, but then you see again that India has lots of everything, including a core of bright young people. (The question is whether the core is large enough to help India to lift-off, which remains to be seen.) Also, India does have a vibrant literary and scholarly scene as well, which has been widely recognized before this, but festivals like this one reinforce that knowledge and certainly serve to move public awareness of their insights forward.

Two favorites of C, the Glamorous Nomad & Abbas: Gloria Steinem on the left. I opted for another session but I received a full report. JLF is full of some tough choices. 

In following posts I'll share some thoughts gleaned from the various sessions that I attended and authors that I heard speak. It was an intense and engaging five days.