Good Djinns

City of Djinns - William Dalrymple

I treasure an old copy of William Dalrymple's "City of Djinns" that I have in my possession. It belonged to my mother. A voracious reader and history teacher, she chose to mark her copy of that wonderful love letter to Delhi with a bindi on the cover, the red dot often worn by Indian women symbolizing the third eye, open only for those with great wisdom and internal energy. In times when I miss her energy, departed from my universe for more than 4 years now, I draw comfort from glancing through a random page within the book. Whether it opens out to the Nigambodh Ghat or New Delhi sections of the book is immaterial. To me and to anyone else who has ever understood how history weaves, both of those and all the Delhis in between will remain Delhi.

Maa was a city-raised Calcutta girl with a soft spot for all fellow creatures, human and non-human. Rescuing kite-string embroiled crows, insisting on non-lethal mouse traps, stern reprimands to our miniature Dachshund (Putputti) when she would fetch moles from our garden in Kolkata - those were her kind of interactions with Nature. She was vehemently opposed to the concept of Nature that is red in tooth and claw, often scolding me for spending too much time watching the 'violence' of a lion hunt on a Discovery Channel documentary and reminding me that 'exposure' to such images can only desensitize the mind. I can only imagine how strongly she would have reacted to that first sweeping order of the Supreme Court on the mass removal of street dogs from Delhi and its use of cowboy language such as "...when it's time to shoot, shoot".

As for me, I am one of them. The kind that MUST pet and talk gibberish to every friendly dog everywhere, street or otherwise and peek into "Beware of Dog" signed houses just to glance at the pre-announced canine resident. I identify with dogs - identify with their diverse personalities, their toxic optimism for life and their relentlessly dumb sniffy curiosity. There is hardly a time after chicken at a roadside eatery that I won't carry the bones in my pajama pocket in hopes of meeting a canine wanderer and I know each house in my neighbourhood only by the name of the dog that lives there, not the family name. I agree with stand-up comedian Ricky Gervais when he says "I do not believe in God but I believe in dog." A lot like my Dad was, I am obsessed with dogs including my two adoptees at home. And a lot like Baba, my love for dogs is very different from how my Maa loved dogs.

This is because I understand why some people are terrified of dogs and can partially understand that fear too. As someone not fond of dogs once said, to him dogs looked like "a fireburst of emotions armed with lots of teeth". The ominous growl that my own dog lets loose when he thinks I am moving his filled food plate is proof enough that there is enough of the wolf in there amidst the buffoonery and cuteness. On morning walks with my dogs, I watch their alliances and rivalries with other dogs wax and wane, a canine Game of Thrones if you will. I am well aware of their irrational dislikes (the clip-clop of horses, society's exploited rag-pickers and the rumble of distant autorickshaws amongst others). As much as it makes my blood boil, the timid queries of "Kaatega toh nahin? (He won't bite, right?" when my happy mutts are just walking down the road (leashed!) probably have its roots in some long-ago acquired trauma or a brainwashed worldview that all dogs can do and will do is bite you without rhyme or reason.

My aim is NOT to make a case for those irresponsible citizens who dump buckets of waste food in neighbourhoods outside their own fostering gangs of semi-wild dogs while they themselves disappear into gated colonies having earned their punya (good karma). They are wrong. My aim is NOT to make light of the horrors that delivery boys, early morning service providers, children of street-dwellers and senior citizens have faced due to (a) bad dog ownership or (b) aggressive dog packs. Such incidents have no place in civil society and every effective step needed to be taken must be. As someone with long personal experience of dealing with the canine universe and a veteran of two dog bites myself, the only deposition I am making is that certain draconian measures to address the 'dog problem' seem to me more about picking soft targets and defenceless scapegoats (scapedogs?) as opposed to handling the larger societal issues that the 'dog problem' is bringing to the fore.

For starters, the burgeoning street dog population is a direct result of notoriously corrupt Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme non-implementation and extreme mismanagement of garbage by our municipalities, both of which can go hand-in-hand to dramatically reduce the number of dogs on our streets. Clean cities and a natural reduction in canine populations - win-win couldn't have a better example. Add to that the simple fact that it would be the friendlier dogs which are likely to be caught up in any sweeping catch and imprison forever judgement implementation (now thankfully overruled). The wilder dogs on the other hand would turn ever more aggressive and reticent compounding the issue. The logistical nightmare or practical feasibility of housing and sustaining the results of a "Catch 'em all" drive I am not even getting into.

Then there is the slightly thornier issue of "Community dogs" where I have had disagreements with some fellow pet-dog owners. Are community dogs even a thing, they ask? Aren't all dogs supposed to be attached to a human and/or human family who take FULL responsibility? If Singapore can get rid of its street dogs, shouldn't we aim to too? We are not Singapore, I tell them. In certain matters, I hope we will never be. I deeply regret that they grew up without the animal joy of knowing a 'community dog' in their own neighbourhoods. In our country lined with difficult days and half-born dreams, those happy faces, those familiar wags waiting for you OUTSIDE your home - free spirits that like you but do not bind you, bring the neighbourhood together like only dogs can. Yes, those dogs do ride on harsh fate but in the right neighbourhood, there is always shelter from rain and in return, for many unable to afford the privilege of keeping a dog a canine balm for pain.

They disturb your beauty sleep, you say, barking at random hours at things unseen? Tens of thousands of years together but beyond their basic motivations, we only know their universe as we would know a djinn's. For all we know, they may be barking at fellow djinns, spirits of uncertain provenance and intentions from a time before we had the security of four walls and concrete jungles. An age-old partnership based on trust, space and mutual understanding that you can now happily jettison but they cannot. 

Not all of the dogs came into the cave next to the crackling fire of your ancestors as they were torn between the call of the wild and the urge of gratitude to the leftover feeders snoring inside. In Delhi, they now have acquired names like Sheru, Laddoo, Rani and Tommy but to them we all owe them a debt going back to a time when history was not yet history or even prehistory, we the Yudhishtirs, Tomars, Tughlaqs, and Supreme Court judges of this mega-metropolis. As the blood moon rises tonight in Delhi and the eclipse takes over, think of all the complaints we make these days of having 'lost connection with nature'. Can we afford to be so relentless in our march to so-called progress that we sweep away even this most basic of bindings to where we began? Can we concretize our hearts against these very good djinns?

Good Djinns

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/09/good-djinns.html]

Lawrence in Arabia: E-Books and War

Lawrence in Arabia

In a recent conversation with a fellow bibliophile, I had to agree that e-books had no soul. The weight of a paper book in hand and the texture of the pages can never be displaced by the best soft backlighting or sharpest of images that their electronic avatars tout. The conversation also reminded of a 15-year old tablet in my possession and of the e-book within it which had long awaited my attention. Soul or no soul, the fact that the tablet still functioned and that the e-book was still unread led me back to Scott Anderson's "Lawrence in Arabia".

The book's fairly long subtitle "War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East" was what had drawn me to purchase it back in 2010. Nothing beats reading yet another record of the casual psychopathy and apathy with which the imperial nations of the modern age, maybe all ages, treat their 'subjects'. While nothing about their behaviour is truly surprising, it bears repetition every once in a while to prevent relapsing into quiet acceptance and a "Let It Be" mentality. The past cannot be undone but it need not be forgotten.

In that jolly spirit, I dipped into the soulless e-book and came away surprised. For one, the core story of Thomas Edward Lawrence (a.k.a "Lawrence of Arabia") turned to be much more than the white 'saviour' of the 'wild' tribes who did not deserve him that I was expecting. For the uninitiated, the legend of Lawrence of Arabia goes that there was this British academic turned spy turned rebel leader who went full "native" with Arabian tribes during the first World War helping them win their freedom from the Ottoman Empire of the Turks only to be immediately divvied up by the British and French ones at the end of it. Lawrence as the lonely symbol of British honour was thus betrayed and his noble intentions were flushed down the drain.

My only acquaintance with the Lawrence legend until this e-book was through an overtly celebratory movie on him, a much awarded 1962 cinematic blockbuster - David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" - which my Dad and many of his generation were big fans of. It was like the Jurassic Park of their times so they were blind to the movie's faults as much as I would be of Steven Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece. As a post liberalization Indian, I already had a less than rosy image of such British 'heroes' but Scott Anderson, as an experienced war journalist, brought me a lot more nuance on the legend. 

The cloak of macho-ness that mass murder (under the banner of war) requires a person to put on and the terrible turbulence caused from the same in any sane person's conscience is captured exceedingly well. Lies, half-truths, averted eyes - all in pursuit of 'national' objectives fuelled by old men sending young men to die brutal deaths for questionable gains. As the book indicates, Lawrence was an extraordinary man shaped by equally extraordinary circumstances but subject to almost all the same flaws as an ordinary one. What Scott Anderson also does very well is flitting between multiple memoirs of the same events, giving due cognizance to the Rashomon effect of individual perceptions and self-images.

It was clear to me through a reading of the story how books, even e-books, stand head and shoulders above any other medium of learning. Here I was, in the comfort of my home in a rainy week in Dehradun, travelling to multiple destinations threaded together through 4 main protagonists - the aforementioned TE Lawrence representing British interests and conflicts; Curt Prufer a German spy academic who was then serving the Kaiser and would go on to serve Hitler too; Aaron Aaronsohn an agronomist cum Zionist with a key role to play in forcing the momentum that would one day birth Israel and William Yale a Yankee scouting for oil in the same war torn provinces while also keeping America up to speed on goings on. 

As an authorial voice, Scott Anderson goes well beyond the usual to elaborate on the confusions, double-dealings, personality quirks and blind coincidences that would shape what continues to be one of the most troubled regions in the world today. More importantly, the book performs a sincere takedown of the glories of war and pseudo-nationalists leaving a bitter and necessary aftertaste of what it does even with its so-called heroes and victors. All sides in a war belabour under the pretence that they are doing "the right thing" but the blood-and-guts journey to victory leaves even the most ardent believer in doubt of their methods.

While I would have loved to have partaken of this story through the pages of a well-thumbed hardcopy, browsing this 15-year old digital replica of a book made me reconsider, albeit briefly, my rigid declaration of the soullessness of an e-book. Are the words that make a book less important just because they have been coded into binaries of 0 and 1 instead of being printed in ink on processed wood pulp? 

All I can say is that I am happy that Scott Anderson's version of the Lawrence story found its way to me, convolutedly, through an ancient barely functional tablet. Digital though it was, its impact was like that of all good books and soon enough, when the tablet dies as it is bound to, I will miss these journeys I took with it across space and time. Unlike a 'real' book, it will not stay on my bookshelf to remind me of our past association. That to me is a different sort of tragedy.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/09/lawrence-in-arabia-e-books-and-war.html]

Offline

Annie Spratt/Unsplash

It is a secret learnt quite late in life. Endless fruitless arguments, particularly of the online kind, should have provided me a clue. As should have that long-ago read article in the New York Times about a man who quit reading the newspapers a few months into the first Trump presidency and focused on only what was immediately visible to him. In an inter-connected world dependent on daily attendance and keeping-up-with-the-Joshis, disconnecting seems to be a privilege granted to an exceedingly small number of people. But that thought may be stemming out more from a fear of missing out rather than any real hindrances. Particularly to those of us who have lived in a fully functional, interconnected world well before the Internet, the possibility of carrying on with our lives without it cannot be such a revelation. Brief forays into it have only enhanced the revolutionary charms of the offline life. The main reason that I do not commit to it fully is that like an alternative sort of addiction, it could be too much to give up on if ever the need arose.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/09/offline.html]

Lore: Corbett and Heritage – Post 1

It has been close to 7 years now since I put all my eggs in the heritage basket and all too frequently congratulated myself for making that choice. The complexities of identity shaped by people, places and stories is what lies at the core of heritage. What this means is that there are innumerable interesting cross connections and nothing beats getting lost on an unknown road to emerge out into places very familiar.

Jim Corbett with his British-Irish origins, a lifetime of adventure in India, his quiet exit from here as soon as the country’s ownership was restored to the right people and the fervour he continues to inspire among his fans to date, including in yours truly, offers the opportunity to discuss all that heritage can entail.

As I set out to Choti Haldwani, the ‘model’ village he set up near his childhood home of Kaladhungi for his 150^th birth anniversary (27^th July 2025), to see the places that shaped him and share space with innumerable other Corbett-heads on the big occasion, it is fair to say that I am excited. Very excited. Under a series of posts titled “Lore: Corbett and Heritage”, I will look at both well-known and not so well-known legacies of this one-of-a-kind personality who inspires devotion and debate for his undeniable role in Indian conservation’s story arc.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/07/lore-corbett-and-heritage-post-1.html]

Pretty Bad Ugly

Perspective is a powerful thing. It can turn the dire into desire and hopelessness into certainty. When heading out to watch a documentary like the Nilgiris in the company of fellow idealists who curse and dream in the same breath, it is not difficult to spot the dissonance. On one hand will be the spectacular footage of wildlife projected onto the magnificence of a full size movie hall, on the other will be the knowledge that even as we watch in the AC-cooled dark confines of a decidedly environmentally harmful supermall, the actual subjects of the film would be that much further on the path to obsolescence through a combination of greed and antipathy. We want to enjoy the sights and sounds of the wild in the comfort of our urban forts but how many of us would be there on the ground when it is required to take a stand against the JCBs? 

Of course, there is the faint flickering hope that amongst the thousands who pay their way to this recorded spectacle of nature’s bounty, a handful of these observers may be impelled to do more than that. This tiny minority of a minority will always be in short supply as bringing change requires mad devotion to the cause, otherwise often left at the mercy of important sounding words urging actions that never materialize. Changemakers will always account for only a minuscule proportion of the population, but the pretty on-screen story might just inspire them to take on the bad and confront the ugly truth yet.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/07/pretty-bad-ugly.html]

Labubu, Pazuzu and their Ilk

I subscribe to two newspapers just so that I can stay off social media trends and focus on meatier issues but as it happens, those very newspapers often report about aforementioned trends. This time though, those trends have a fascinating intersection with history, so couldn't resist writing about it.

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The reporter tells me of a trend of not-so-cute dolls by a Hong Kong designer which go by the name Labubu whose designs seem to be now inspired by a 1st millennium BCE Mesopotamian demonic figure Pazuzu. Besides the rather memorable names of both those trends, it is a good reflection of the fact that bored humans over the rather brief history of our species have always liked a good scare. Even as social media algorithms press all sorts of buttons on rage, fear, love and lust, it is good to see social media talk about stuff from a few thousand years ago as opposed to, say, only-a-90s-kid-would-know sort of non-historic nonsensical nostalgia.

I, on the other hand, when I read of Pazuzu's historical role - a defender against demons being the mean demon that he is - I am forced to think of all the painted "Buri Nazar Waalein Teraa Muuh Kaalaa" [Sort of translating to - Envious people, may infamy pursue you] demons I have grown seeing on the backs of trucks in India. Not that I grew up on the highways of India, mind you, but the route to my school required us traverse a stretch of the same for a good decade or so. In houses in Uttarakhand, the same envy-busting demon's face now in clay molded form glares off newly built houses in my neighbourhood. Between the Middle Eastern Pazuzu and the far-eastern Labubu, I guess we should be happy to have our own version of what seems to be a trend that will never go out of fashion.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/07/labubu-pazuzu-and-their-ilk.html]

Audience

The premise was interesting, very interesting. A bank-heist caper set in the small towns and urban villages of Bengal in the mould of a genius criminal vs dogged cop drama. The output was fantastic too. Tense camerawork, authentic acting and locale worthy music brought together the story with impact and verve. "Bohurupi", a movie which I watched yesterday without even seeing its trailer or reviews delivered entertainment in spades for Baba and me. Not exactly a Childrens' Day movie though we watched it on the day, it pushed a message that becomes all the more clearer as you grow older, that for capable and sincere 'professionals' pushed into corners by unfair circumstances, the 'moral' choice is not default. Baba's end of movie statement that "Bangla cinema kothai pouchey geyeche... baaki der theke ONEK oporre [Look where Bengali cinema has reached... the others will never be able to catch up]" was the typical unwarranted over-the-top declaration without which Bengaliness remains uncertified. Nonetheless, I would recommend watching it. Worth your time.

But the reason I write this post is that all through the movie, I couldn't stop thinking about what would people on whom the movie is based feel about the same? The memorably portrayed independent pick-pocketeer Jhimli with a sharp tongue and seductive eyes. Would she feel represented through the movie or would she think that 'her' character was a simplified novelty meant for city viewers? The small town 'chor' [thief] guru Salim who is a master at his craft but only in the small world that he inhabits - he is no suave Danny Ocean whom international audiences (claim to) admire and (aspire to) relate to, chor or not. Would he judge the directors Shiboprasad Mukherjee and Nandita Roy for projecting expertise on themes they don't have it on? The bohurupis [quick-change folk artists who travel in troupes performing in town and village squares which are usually off the 'in' circuit] themselves, skilled in 'overacting' and melodrama of the kind that sells to a less urbane and therefore less cynical audience. Would they feel proud that audiences in Kolkata, and possibly the globe, would now know of them or are they also well aware that their caricaturish passionate performances which form the baseline of the film will not make its urban audience actually attend in person their rapidly fading world of street performances to support or to save it? But then again, through the centuries they have been master shape shifters/spies/survivors and for them success is not dependent on such fickle support driven by Netflix trends and corporate YOLO mantras. For them, a new story arc and a new beginning is one snappy costume change away.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/11/audience.html]