Steve Jobs Dies

I would be lying if I said I was a fan of Steve Jobs. That is not to say I was not a fan of Steve jobs. I just had no views on Steve Jobs, not being a techno-geek.

My relationship to technology is roughly the same as that Dawn French’s to low carb diet. I don’t understand it; I am suspicious of it; I can do without it; and I can’t understand others who make a fuss about it.

Yet even I had heard of Steve Jobs as some sort of visionary (who was also an immensely wealthy man).

It is not my intention to write an obituary of Steve Jobs, here. However, when I did a google search and went through some of the obituaries I learned some facts about his personal life which I thought were interesting.

There were several facts about Steve Jobs that I did not know. I am aware that there is nothing sui generis about these facts, and they assume interest (to me) only because of what Steve Jobs went on to become.

I did not know that he was half Arab by birth. His biological father was a Syrian Muslim by the name of Abdulfattah Jandali  (who later became a political science professor). His mother, Joanne, was American of German-Swiss ancestry.  Both his parents were very young college graduates when Joanne fell pregnant. Her father would not allow her to marry an Arab and under pressure from her white, conservative, Christian family Joannae went to San Fracisco on her own where she gave birth to a boy. It was arranged that the child would be adopted. Years later, in a speech Jobs recalled that his biological mother was very keen that the adoptive parents be college graduates. Accordingly a rich lawyer and his wife were all set to adopt Joanne’s child. Except that they changed their minds at the last minute and decided that they really wanted a girl child. Paul and Clara Jobs, a childless Armenian couple that was on the waiting list, was contacted in the middle of the night and asked whether they would want to adopt a boy, and they said yes. Joanne was very unhappy when she learned that the prospective adoptive parents had never been to college. She refused to sign the adoption papers. She relented after a few months only when Paul Jobs promised her that the boy would go to college one day. The adoption finally went through and the baby was named Steve.

Abdulfattah Jandali was not involved in any of this. Years later he recalled that at that time he was very much in love with Joanne, but her ‘tyrannical’ father who was ‘like a dictator’ refused to accept him as his son-in-law because he was a Muslim and a foreigner. According to Jandali, Joanne just ‘upped and left’. He had apparently no idea where she had gone.

The irony is: within 10 months of giving away their son for adoption Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne married, and very soon after that her father, so opposed to the inter-racial marriage, died. The couple went on to have another child, a daughter, who is Steve Jobs’s biological sister. The marriage did not last and, in the early 1960s, Joanne and Abdulfattah Jandali divorced (or he walked out on his family). Joanne married again and their daughter, Mona, took on the name of her step-father and became Mona Simpson.

I had never heard of Mona Simpson before but apparently she is a novelist who has published five novels.

Paul Jobs kept the promise he had given to Joanne. When he was 17 Steve Jobs enrolled in Reed college that was, as he recalled later, as expensive as Stanford. Almost all of his working class parents’ savings were spent on his college education and he did not even like the course. After  a year he dropped out of the course and began dropping in on courses that looked interesting. He slept on the floor of his friend’s room, returned coke bottles to buy food with and every Sunday walked 7 miles to a Hare Krishna temple where he would have his only square meal of the week.

I did not know that at the age of 19 Jobs travelled to India where he stayed in an ashram of an Indian mystique, the intriguingly named Neem Karoli Baba. When returned to America several months later, he had shaved his head and he was wearing traditional Indian clothes. He had become a Buddhist.

Steve Job stayed Buddhist for the rest of his life (although his published photos in the last decade of so show suggest that he stopped wearing traditional Indian clothes).

Steve Jobs started Apple in his parents’ garage when he was 20. The rest, as they say, was history. It would however be fair to say that it was not smooth sailing all the way for Jobs. In the mid-1980s he was publically ousted from Apple. He founded another company named NeXT, which was not the whopping success he thought it would be; but the other company he formed, Pixer, went on to produce the first feature length animated film, Toy Story, the first of the many successful films Pixer produced  in partnership with Disney. In 2006 Disney bought Pixer in a reported all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion dollars.

In 1997 Apple bought NeXT and Jobs made a triumphant return to the company he co-founded twenty years previously in his parents’ garage.

In the 1970s Jobs had a relationship with a Bay area painter named Chrisann Brennan, his first serious girl-friend, and had a daughter, named Lisa, from that relationship. Jobs, who was very wealthy by that time initially refused to accept that he was the father and swore in a  court document that he could not possibly be the father because he was ‘sterile and infertile’, and therefore physically incapable of procreating. He later accepted that he was the father and was reconciled with her. He financed Lisa’s university education at Harvard. He married Laurene Powell in a Buddhist ceremony in 1991 and the couple has three children.

In 2004 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which is generally considered to have very poor prognosis. However he apparently had a rare form of cancer which could be treated with surgery. For several months following the diagnosis, Jobs reportedly refused to follow doctors’ advice to undergo surgery and experimented with Eastern (presumably unproven) alternative treatments. He accepted to undergo surgery after nine months. The surgery gave him seven more years to live, helped, one assumes, along the way by another major surgery—a liver transplant—in 2009.

Jobs was, for all outward appearances, not very curious about his biological parents. At one point he is believed to have made the observation that he did not believe in genetics but in experiences. He considered his adoptive parents as his real mother and father. However he is believed to have tracked down his biological mother with the help of a private detective in the mid 1980s and also met his novelist sister to whom he became very close. Jobs was invited by Mona Simpson at the launch of her debut novel Anywhere But Here’. Jobs invited his biological mother to some of his big launches.

Jobs never publically discussed his biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali; and it is very probable that the two men never met in life. Indeed it is possible that Jandali was not even aware until a few years ago that the son given away by Joanne for adoption all those years ago, whom he had never seen in person, was the famous Steve Jobs. However it seems inconceivable that Jobs (who had gone to some lengths to trace and contact his biological mother and who was close to his biological sister from mid-1980s onwards) did not know who his biological father was.

Abdulfattah Jandali, a non-practising Muslim (who nevertheless ‘believes in Islam—doctrine and culture’) never met his son. After he left his wife and young daughter Jandali drifted from jobs to jobs before he left  academia altogether and  for decades has lived in Reno where he is a well-off vice-president of a casino. Jandali, the only son of a Syrian ‘self-made millionaire’, was educated in Beirut and came to United States when he was 18 and obtained a PhD in political science very swiftly. As reticent as his famous son, Jandali never spoke about his famous son until recently. None of his erstwhile colleagues in the academic world, nor his colleagues in Reno (save some close friends), knew that Jandali was Steve Job’s father.

In August this year, the month Jobs stepped down as Apple’s chief, Jandali broke his decades long silence on his famous son (incredibly to a British tabloid). He expressed regret that he never got to know his famous son. However he also clarified that he was not prepared ‘even if either of us was on our death bed to pick up a phone and call him. Steve would have to do that.’ Apparently the Syrian pride ‘does not want him [Jobs] to think that I am after his fortune.’ But he longed to meet his son. He hoped that ‘before it is too late he [Steve Jobs] would reach out to me. Even to have one coffee with him just once would make me a very happy man.’

Jobs did not respond to this very public appeal from his father.

When contacted by newspapers in Reno after the death of Steve Jobs was announced Jandali declined to comment. ‘I really don’t have anything to say,’ he said, ‘I know the news.’

A statement from Apple announcing Jobs’s passing on said: ‘In his public life Steve was a visionary. In his private life he cherished his family.’

In a speech he gave to the students of Stanford University in 2005 Jobs had this to say about death:

‘No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share.’

After a very remarkable life Jobs has gone to his final destination, the very best invention (as he said in his famous Stanford speech) of life. May his soul rest in peace.

Another Round of Quantitative Easing: It Won't Work

The Bank of England (BoE) has finally announced what many pundits were predicting it would do. It has decided to print more money. (I know! I know! This is primarily a book blog, but my escape clause is I have given myself permission to write on any subject that happens to interest me at a given time).

Let’s recap a bit, shall we?

We are in the middle of the worst recession since the Black Death. Europe is crumbling; America, according to many economists, self-appointed experts, and financial hacks is heading for a double dip recession; and Japan enjoys the dubious distinction of having interest rates that are even lower than those of the BoE (and where has it got them?). Some might hope (in desperation) that the emerging giants of Asia—China and India—will be the engines to kick-start world economy, but it ain’t gonna happen. China and India are bubbles. This notion that there are more than 2 billion people out there, all salivating at the prospect of buying Western goods, while it might make a compelling narrative to hack out an article for some financial mag, is ludicrous. If anything, chances are that the European and Western demands for Chinese trinkets and plastic dolls will go down and China may have to look to its domestic market to maintain its growth (which is slowing, suggesting that the economy is overheating), and whatever else the Chinese peasants might need, I am guessing they would do without a Barbie doll. The Chinese property market is heading for, as they say, a hard landing; and the time is not far off when the Chinese regime will have to think hard about how many more dams it is going to build. Not good news for exporters to China.

Let’s also give it a thought why we are in recession. OK, the monetary crisis was triggered by the dodgy shenanigans of the banks which began speculating money they did not own in riskier and riskier endeavours.

But that is not the whole story.

We in the West have been living way beyond our means for a long time; and now it’s payback time. Debt is never good, especially when you’re paying it down. When the time arrives to pay back your debts, the good time you’ve had with the debt is a faint memory. I accept that there is no escaping debts in the modern (capitalist) societies. However, there are—to paraphrase football jargon—debts and there are debts. If you’ve a mortgage that is an essential debt. If, on the other hand, you’ve built up huge credit card debts buying crap you have watched advertisement of on the idiot box or some other junk you’ve got to have because some vacuous friends of yours have bought it (building their own mountains of credit card debts), then you are the author of your own misfortune.

A friend of mine who recently bought an i-pad (which he can afford but does not need; at least I don’t think he needs, as he has a perfectly serviceable lap top, which, incidently, he upgrades every two years; the guy is a manager of a warehouse) told me that ‘research’ has apparently shown that people owning i-pads are happier than people who own androids, or some such nonsense. It astonishes me that someone would find this worth researching (but it wouldn't astonish me at all to know that the ‘research’ was funded by a grant from the UK government); but even if it is true, you'd agree with me that it says more about the state of collective British psych (or, if you are pedantic, the colelctive psych of people interviewed in the survey) rather than inherent antidepressant properties of i-pad.

It never ceases to amaze me seeing people entrapped in the cage of consumer debt, the walls of which they have lovingly built themselves. For too long people in Britain have been building up debts to service lifestyles which they can’t afford (and probably makes them more miserable; I mean if your self-esteem and inner peace is entirely determined by whether you own a posh car, or show off a fancy hand-bag made from the hide of an animal, or own some ridiculously priced gadget which is the absolute tops until the next absolute tops comes along the next day and you hanker after that, one does not have to be an Indian guru to figure out that it is going to come crashing around your ears sooner or later). It can’t go on, and now the time has arrived to swallow the bitter pill.

(It further astonishes me to see middle classes, which I would have thought ought to know better, getting entangled into the debt trap. They have assets (which they risk of losing) if they can’t pay their debts, yet some of them carried on spending money, tying the money in harebrained schemes etc.,  and building up debts. If you don’t own any assets, if you are one of the beneficiaries of the benefit system, sure, carry on with your hedonistic life-style. What have you got to lose? Just say the right things to your doctor who, for no other reason than to get you out of his office, will support your disability claim, and you are off.)

OK, enough ranting against the consumerism plaguing the British society (in particular the middle classes). Back to macroeconomics.

The way I see it we are in recession (or almost in recession) because ultimately there is not enough money in the system. That could be either because there is not enough money available or not enough money is changing hands.

So what is the answer of the BoE? They are going to create money electronically. It is not the money that is coming into the system from some outside source, mind (e.g. exports, although, come to think of it what is it that Britain produces, other than weapons of mass destructions that are sold to the African and Middle Eastern despots, that is desired by the world?, although, in recent years we have tried to export hooliganism). This money is simply printed and poured into the system. The 64 million dollars question is: will the money go to the part of the economy that needs it? The BoE will give money to the banks and its big hope will be the banks will start lending money. But will they? They did not do it the first time round (paying down as they were their own bad debts). What if the banks may once again decide to hoard the cash? In which case the money will not come into system at all.
Suppose the banks do decide to lend the money. Will there be appetite amongst people to take it, especially if there is job insecurity? Take the housing market as an example. The house prices in Britain—barring some crazy parts in London—are generally considered to be down, and they are expected to fall down further next year. Why might that be? Obvious answer is people are either unable or unwilling to take out a mortgage (which is ultimately a debt). The commonly held assumption is that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there, itching to get on the housing ladder, but can’t because they can’t secure mortgages. Even if this is true, there may be very good reasons why at least a proportion of them is unable to secure mortgages: the banks have become more careful when they lend. Gone are the days of 100% loan (now that was a bubble) but many banks may require 15-20% deposits, and if you can’t afford that, they are not going to lend you. What I am saying is: just because BoE has decided to print money, it does not mean that banks will relax their lending rules any time soon or there will be a sudden demand for incurring more debt.

The inevitable consequence of printing money is an increase in inflation. That is if it works and the BoE achieves its aim of getting more money into the system. If there is a lot of money sloshing about, it stands to reason that its value will be lowered. Which means the prices of everything from utilities to commodities will shoot up. And that is potentially a risky thing. Controlling inflation is like riding a Bengal tiger. There is no guarantee that you will be able to control the beast. And with the public sector salaries frozen for the foreseeable future, that is going to hurt. Shadeloads of people in the public sector are going to lose their jobs in the coming years (primarily because the jobs were probably non-jobs in the first place, created by the previous Labour government, which had no real answer for the big structural deficits in the British economy, and simply created public sector non-jobs from the money pumped into the system by the City), and there is no way the private sector has the capacity to accommodate the orphaned (as my friend, the warehouse manager, puts it, who needs strategic manager for waste disposal system?). That will put more strain on the system, as these people will turn to the government for support at a time when less money will come to the government by way of taxes.

And to make the miseries of those, who still have jobs and are thrifty, complete, the interest rates are at what the BBC never tires of repeating ad nauseum historic low. Anyone in Britain with an ounce of sense will be focusing on paying off their debts, worried that they may not have the job security; and with the inflation looming the tendency would be not to spend (saving money for the rainy day and all that. (I know of some people who are now buying shares and, worryingly, dabbling in riskier practices such as spread-baiting to see their money grow, as the interest rates are ridiculously low).

This, I believe, is the Keynesian paradox where everyone becomes thrifty at exactly the wrong time, although I also think that the moment of spending your way out of recession—the Keynesian solution to Great Depression— is long gone. Much as I hate to admit it, dodgy Dave—smoother than snot on the doorknob—is right when he said in the Neo-Nasty party conference that we need to man up and pay down our credit card debts or some such cheap lines his speech writer wrote for him.

Quantitative easing is an exercise in futility. It will not work. It did not work in Japan, and it won’t work here.

Why there aren't Many Jewish Writers in Britain

When Howard Jacobson won the 2010 Booker Prize I was pleased for two reasons: firstly, Jacobson is one of the writers I have enjoyed reading. Even when he is not at his best, as in Who is Sorry Now?, he is entertaining. And when he is firing on all cylinders, as in Coming from Behind and PeepingTom, he is absolutely first rate. This was the first time Jacobson was short-listed for the prize and the award was a long overdue recognition of a writer who has produced high quality novels over a long period.

The second reason I felt pleased was the novel, The Finkler Question, was described as a comic novel. In an interview after the award, Jacobson was at pains to clarify that he was a comic / serious writer. He was not comic light. (Who can be described as a comic light writer? P.G. Wodehouse?) The Finkler Question, he (somewhat pompously) declared, was comedy taken in to troubled and tragic areas. Whatever. I love reading comic novels (both comic/serious and comic/light), and I was pleased that after a long time a comic novel was considered worthy of a literary and fairly influential (at least in the UK) award.

It did not occur to me to be pleased that Jacobson was also a Jewish writer.

I read The Finkler Question last month and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I am not going to review The Finkler Question here.  It is a typical Jacobson fare, about a middle aged man obsessed about Jewishness, the twist being he is not actually Jewish. It is a very funny novel, and very moving in parts (perhaps that’s what meant when he said he was a comic / serious writer).  It is, like most of Jacobson’s earlier novels, a very Jewish novel. But I do not immediately think Jewish when I think of Jacobson. He is a British writer.

However, judging by some of the comments Jacobson made in the wake of his Booker triumph, his Jewish heritage in the wider context of British culture was very much on Jacobson’s mind when he wrote The Finkler Question.

‘The Question of anti-Semitism in this country [Britain] is vexed,’ Jacobson said. ‘Do we Jews imagine it, do we half want it to define ourselves by, do we contribute to it by harping on about it (a particularly sinister suggestion)? Such are the questions the characters in The Finkler Question discuss—a reflection of what the British Jews are asking each other.’

So The Finkler Question, at one level, by its author’s admission, a novel about what it means to be a Jew in modern day Britain. Fair enough. Does that make Jacobson a Jewish writer? The man himself appears to be ill at ease with this idea of being defined by his Jewishness. In one of the many post-Booker interviews he gave, Jacobson, when directly questioned about it, said:

 ‘Although I talk about things Jewish, when I hear anyone saying, “another book about Jewish identity from Howard Jacobson”, I think that's not what I'm writing about. For me the Jewish world is one of the worlds that I happen to know. It was the world I grew up in, so it's full of references for me. It's almost like the miners in DH Lawrence or the sailors in Joseph Conrad. You don't go to Joseph Conrad because you want to read a sea story, or to DH Lawrence because you want to read about miners, that's just where it's set. Essentially, without being grand about it, you're just writing about humanity. If you asked me is this book about being Jewish or being a man? I would say that it's more about being a man.’

Jonathan Safron Foyer remarked that had Jacobson been born in America and had written exactly the same kind of novels he would have been considered up there with Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, the two great twentieth century Jewish-American chroniclers.  Jacobson has always disliked the epithet ‘British Philip Roth’ bestowed upon him by some, and once remarked semi-jocularly that he considered himself to be the love child of Philip Roth and Jane Austen.

However, the comments of Jonathan Saffron Foer (whom some consider to be the 21^st century writer in the tradition of Roth on the basis of two novels he has so far published) raises a curious point: there really is no tradition of Jewish-British literature the way there is of Jewish American literature.  Why might this be?

One obvious reason (to me) is that there aren’t very many Jews in Britain. This is a country of more than 60 million, of which less than 0.5% are Jewish, not a huge pool. So realistically how many novels are you going to get about Jewishness? Not many I would have thought. So a simple answer to the question why there aren’t more Jewish writers in Britain is that there aren’t many Jews in Britain.

Another reason could be Britain’s curiously monolithic, inward looking, (some might say self-satisfied, self-important, and smug) culture. I remember coming across a comment somewhere that Britain is country with great past and no future. That is obviously a hyperbole, but, like all hyperboles, there is a kernel of truth hidden somewhere at its core. The English are very sure of their place in the scheme of things (at the top rung of the ladder) and have an exalted and unchanging view of the past. The Jews, like the Irish, were just about tolerated; they were invited to take a ringside seat and spectate; but neither of the communities was thought to have anything worthwhile to contribute to a culture that was already formed. Prime Minister’s Cameron’s assertion that state multiculturalism has failed in Britain, while it might not be factually incorrect, is symptomatic of the sentiments bubbling just under the surface, attempt as it does to put the blame for this failure at the doors of the ‘other’, ‘minority’ cultures. Although I doubt very much that Cameron had the Jews in his mind when he made his crass speech—he was aiming at the British Muslims, majority of whom come from South East Asia—if we try to apply these sentiments to Jewish literature, we can perhaps begin to understand why there isn’t as well-known a tradition of Jewish literature in Britain as there is in America. There was a great pressure on the Jews, one of the only two ‘ethnic minorities’ in Britain (the other being Irish, but the Irish have always had their tradition of literature, primarily, in my view, because they had their own nation-state where the Irish way of life and Irish traditions could be preserved) before the arrivals of the migrants from South East Asia and the Caribbean, to assimilate. And many Jews did assimilate. Assimilation, in its extreme form, demands that the assimilator jettison his cultural, religious heritage and embrace in totality the culture surrounding him. Unlike in America, the Jews in Britain did not (could not) contribute to the construction of the national identity. The English knew who they were, what they were, and did not want foreigners speaking strange languages and with curious customs to sully the matters, thank you very much. The ‘minorities’, migrants if you will, have two choices: either forget your identity and embrace the main-stream culture (even though that would not make them ‘propha’ English); or live in a ghetto.

In his 2004 novel, The Making of Henry (which I have reviewed earlier on this blog), this is more or less Jacobson says (far more elegantly than I ever can) via the novel’s curmudgeonly eponymous protagonist:

‘In America [Henry says] the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity, had made the American cause their own, had even shaped it, sometimes dangerously—tempting fate, risking a backlash—in their own image. Not in England, not in Manchester, not on the Pennines. Yes, they were dutiful citizens; they paid their taxes, fought in wars, performed charitable deeds, gave service to the community—but only for the right, at last, to be left alone to notice nothing, and not be noticed noticing it.’

At one point in the novel, Henry’s girl friend, who insists she is non-Jewish (although he is convinced that she is), tells Henry off about his ‘self-conscious’ Jew thing.

‘I think it is childish, Henry [Moira says]. No one is asking you to pretend that you are somebody other than you are . . .But it is provincial to keep going on about it. And insecure. In my experience people who can’t stop talking about themselves aren’t easy with it. The man of the world accepts who he is and the influences which have made him and then gets on with living in the world. The big world.’

(Henry feels no obligation to take on board the above advice and keeps up with his Jewish thing, making The Making of Henry, a very Jewish novel. In another interview Jacobson said that Kalooki Nights was his most Jewish novel. I can’t imagine how any novel can be more Jewish than The Making of Henry, but, as I an Americans friend of mine is fond of saying, I sure am gonna find out.)

Things do not necessarily become easier for the children of the migrants who grew up to be British. As Linda Grant, one of the finest Jewish writers writing in English today (although many would not identify her as Jewish) said once:

‘How does someone in Britain born into both an observant conservative Jewish family but going to school every day in a non-Jewish environment, construct an identity they can use as a writer?’

This is a dilemma faced by, I suspect, almost all ‘ethnic’ minorities, not only by the Jewish community. The ‘minorities’, Jewish and others, with their distinct pasts, cannot, will not, be absorbed into Britishness—cultural, communal or territorial—into the bargain a sense of inferiority would be imposed upon them (as evinced by the attacks on the Muslim community, majority of which is law-abiding, by politicians of all ranks and parties and the barely suppressed Islamophobic atmosphere that pervades the majority community). If one dares to look into one’s community the entire time one risks getting pigeonholed and, linked to it, stereotyped. It is interesting that Monica Aliand Zadie Smith, who burst on to the UK literary scene with their debut novels which can be loosely described as having been derived from their part-cultural (‘part’ because both had one parent English) background, felt compelled to move away from the ‘ethnic backgrounds’ in their subsequent novels. Jhumpa Lahiri, the 2000 Pulitzer winner, has taken inspiration from her culture in her published output so far. Lahiri was born in London, but went to live in America at a young age with her Indian parents; and one wonders whether that has anything to do with the nature of her literary output and the unfaltering manner in which she ‘allows’ the influences that have shaped her to enter, dominate, even, her fiction. 

So, why aren’t there more Jewish writers writing Jewish fiction in the UK?  The answer: there aren’t many Jews in Britain. And the British culture discourages strong expressions of identity when it (the culture) does not conform to the hidebound ideas of the majority community of what elements go on to make a rich culture.

Here is a WikiPedia list of British Jewish writers. I don’t know how complete the list is. Not all on the list were born in Britain.

Of the list, the ones I have read (and liked) are Anita Brookner, Linda Grant, Howard Jacobson, Ruth Prawer-Jhabwala (not born in Britain and hasn’t lived in Britain for decades), Arthus Koestler (not born in Britain), Marghanita Laski (have read only one novel and absolutely loved it), Bernice Rubens (winner of the 1969 Booker), William Sutcliffe (didn’t know he was Jewish. His Are You Experienced? is a laugh out loud romp), Zoe Heller (listed as Jewish in WikiPedia because her father was Jewish; has immigrated to America), the great Muriel Spark (although she converted to Catholicism), and last but not the least Elias Canetti (Bulgarian born, but lived in Britain for 20 odd years. Auto da Fe, Canetti's only full length novel is, in my view, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, although Canetti wrote it before he arrived in England, and the novel is not set here).

Then there are Stephen Fry and Will Self (both Jewish from their mothers’ side) whom I have read but don’t rate too high.  

I have read a novel each of Naomi Alderman and Lisa Appignanesi, and while I was not bowled over by tem, I have kept an open mind. 

Finally there is Simon Sebag Montefiore who has written a novel (which I haven’t read) but is more well known as a historian.

A Grumpy Chick

A British novelist by the name of Polly Courtney has publicaly ditched her publisher, Harper Collins. Courtney is miffed that Avon, a Harper Collins imprint with which she had signed a three-books deal, decided to ‘shoehorn’ her novel ‘into a place that is not right for it.’  

The place where the publishers believed the novel fitted was women’s fiction. In other words chick lit.

‘The real issue I have,’ Courtney explained (at the launch of the novel, funded, I guess, by the publishers), ‘is it has been completely defined as women’s fiction.’ Which, Courtney will thank us to remember, it most certainly isn't.

What is it then? Lest the readers mistake the novel (entitled incidentally It’s a Man's World) for some gigantic Russian classic that would be a cure for insomnia, Ms Courtney hastens to add, ‘It is not War and Peace.' 

Well, thank f**k for that. Imagine going to Waterstone’s (this shouldn't require too much imagination), spotting It’s A Man’s World, thinking to yourself: this seems exactly the kind of novel like Leo's War and Peace, buying it and rushing home because you can’t wait to find out the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist Russia, and finding out, instead, that it’s about a chick who works in a lad’s magazine and participates in a witty banter. 

What is chick lit anyway? WIkiPedia defines it as genre fiction that addresses issues of modern womanhood, often humorously and light-heartedly.  

What is It’s A Man World about? Not having read the novel I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but according to The Guardian, it follows the life of Alexa Harris who heads a lad’s magazine and is subjected to light-hearted misogyny of her male colleagues and hate campaign of women’s rights activist. 

Does it sound like chick-lit to you? It does to me.

Mind you, I have nothing against the genre of chick-lit fiction; in fact I have nothing against genre fiction at all. Frequently I find that genre fiction is more interesting and entertaining than literary fiction. (Recently I ploughed through two unreadable award winning literary novels: The Road, which won the Pulitzer a few years ago, and The Tiger’s Wife, which won this year’s Orange prize. I usually have a high threshold for crapola, but these two novels crossed it by the width of Siberia.) As for the genre of chick lit I have read a few, which I have enjoyed. I quite liked the first Bridget Jones novel (not its sequel, though), which unleashed an army of Bridgets. I remember enjoying an early Lisa Jewell novel, too, the title of which I forget. These novels were fast-paced, entertaining, had well defined plots, and had witty dialogues, which is more than what you get in a Martin Amis novel (which has witty dialogues but no plot to speak of and progresses at a pace slower than that of a shuffling Parkinsonian victim). I am seriously thinking of borrowing from the library Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Diaries.

It all comes down to connotations and implications. Polly Courtney has nothing against chick lit (she says). But her novel, she insists, is not chick lit. (We have already established that it is not War and Peace either.) Helpfully, Courtney provides us with her definition of chick lit. ‘The implication,’ Courtney says, ‘about chick lit is about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams.’ Whereas Polly Courtney’s books, she would like us to note, are about ‘social issues, this time [her most recent novel] about a woman working in a lad’s mag and the impact of media on society and feminism’. And how has Courtney dealt with this weighty social issue? According to her, the novel is ‘commercial and page turning’.

What about the jacket of the novel? It is apparently a chick lit staple. It shows a pair of slender legs in high heels, wrapped in a tight skirt that hides what you suspect is a very shapely ass. 

Courtney, a former investment banker who left the city and self-published her debut novel before she was picked up by Harper Collins, is not happy about the jacket. Her objections are: the jacket is ‘degrading to her writing and ultimately degrading to women. It’s sexist.’ ‘They dressed up my book,’ Courtney complained, ‘as something frivolous, light, and racy, which is the complete opposite of what is inside the books.’ So Alexa Harris, the heroine of It’s A Man’s World, might be working in a lad’s magazine and participate in witty banter with her light-heartedly misogynist male colleagues, but it is a serious book about an important social issue that gives a sombre social message. And it wouldn’t do at all to trivialize it by wrapping the message in a saucy jacket cover (which, heavens forbid, might make all those out there, fans of chick lit, buy it, and millions of copies might be sold), says the woman who, according to her official website, has posted saucy pictures of her poledancing on the Internet.

What we have established is It’s A Man World is a work of fiction about a young woman working in a lad’s magazine and, according to its author, it is commercial, fast paced and page turning.  But the author has a problem with it being labelled as chick lit. It’s a bit like your very popular local Chinese takeaway (which ladles out mouth-watering quantities of grease and mono-sodium glutamate at bargain prices) taking umbrage that it is not awarded a Michelin Star.

We all have pretensions, and, like most pretensions, they serve the function of making the pretenders comfortable. 

Book of the Month: Becoming British, the Making of Mr Hai's Daughter (Yasmin Hai)

Becoming British, the Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter, is the memoir of Yasmin Hai, a journalist (and a television reporter in the past) of growing up in the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s.

Yasmin’s Hai’s father  went by the very impressive name of Syed Samsamul Hai. He was a Pakistani immigrant who arrived in Britain in the mid-1960s. Born in India before it was partitioned, Mr Hai went to the prestigious Aligarh University in Uttar Pradesh, India. While at Aligarh University Mr Hai, along with a few close friends, joined the Communist party of India and came to hold a view that only through Communism would the Indian people free themselves of the fetters of religion and poverty. When the British left and the country was partitioned, Mr Hai moved to the other side of the continent—Pakistan—which, you have to say, was probably not a very smart move, as he was vehemently opposed to the concept of a Muslim nation, the very basis of Pakistan. In Pakistan Mr Hai became a professor of English at a prestigious collage in Karachi. He also continued to dabble in politics and wrote polemics against religion. In the 1950s, the inevitable happened. The Communist party of which he was a member was banned and its leaders imprisoned. Mr. Hai went underground and lived in hiding for much of the 1950s before coming to England courtesy of the British immigration policy fuelled by labour shortage. He was well into his forties and a bachelor when he arrived in England. But he was well equipped with facts and figures which he thought would help him adjust to his adopted country: he knew all the words of the English national anthem, could reel off all the English national holidays, and—this was most important for him—knew inside out and back to front all the English sayings. He was in a progressive country (he thought) and wanted to be progressive himself. And to prove his progressiveness, he would go with a friend—an Indian Muslim who had married an Englishwoman (and not just any Englishwoman, but an educated woman with a Ph.D in English who taught at London University)—in the evenings to the local pub to have a drink. Nothing—not even the loud comments by White men in the pub who asked the ‘stupid Paki’ to give it a rest—would diminish Mr Hai’s enthusiasm for his adopted country. Then Mr Hai got married. His was an arranged marriage, to an educated woman (who had done MA in political science) from Pakistan, who, nevertheless, could not speak a word of English when she arrived in England. So Mr Hai began teaching her English. In due course Yasmin, their eldest child, was born, followed by two more children. Mr Hai was almost fifty when he became a father. He now turned his attention to his children and systematically went about making them model British citizens: operation English had begun.

The Hai family lived in a lower-middle class Asian ghetto in Wembley, London. Almost all of young Yasmin’s friends were Pakistani Muslims. But there was a difference. Mr Hai prohibited his children from going to Koran classes. He insisted that they speak in English all the time, even though it meant that their mother, who despite her husband’s efforts had not managed to become fully proficient in the language of her exile, had difficulty in communicating with her own children (he eventually decreed that the mother could speak in Urdu, a language the children understood, but they had to reply in English, a language, he reasoned, she understood). And they had to learn to use forks and knives while eating. He was also very keen that his children do well academically—here his job would appear to have been made easier, as his eldest daughter was a bright student. He did not believe in corporal punishment; instead he discussed issues with his children, hammering out at every opportunity his message: be like the English. In an incident, very touchingly narrated, teenage Yasmin truanted from her secondary school and went clubbing (during the day) with other Muslim girls from her lane to a Bahngra party, and while coming out of the club was spotted by one of the ‘aunties’ from her community, who promptly passed on the news to her parents. This is how Mr Hai chose to approach the issue when Yasmin returned home: ‘Asian party one day and next thing, you’ll be wanting to watch Bollywood filums and go to the mosque.’ When Yasmin protested that her friends were not like how he depicted them, that they were, like her, doing O levels, Mr Hai retorted, ‘What do you know? Underneath they are still steeped in religion. One day you will see.’ And finally, as his bolshy daughter began answering back, he concluded, smiling, ‘Our disagreement is what is commonly known as “generation gap”’.

Mr Hai’s prognostications about Yasmin’s friends would bear out. In the 1990s, one by one, almost all of her friends had had arranged marriages and embraced orthodox Islam, becoming devoutly religious. However, Mr Hai did not live to see his prophecies come true. In 1987, when his seventeen-year daughter was doing O levels, Mr Hai dropped dead of a heart attack. He was sixty-eight. In the second, much more sombre, part of the memoir Yasmin Hai describes how her mother and she (we do not get to know a lot about the younger siblings) came to terms with the sudden loss of the most important man in their lives. She also describes events, beginning with the Rushdie affair, that would come to have a profound effect on the way in which the West would come to view the community to which she belonged by birth, if not by practice. Yasmin enrolled to study politics at Manchester University, a decision her father, who was very interested in politics, would have wholeheartedly approved. For a while she moved back home with her family, but then, while her childhood friends were getting married, having babies, covering themselves in traditional Islamic scarves, and immersing themselves in the reading of Koran, she moved out and, over the next few years, worked on several programmes (including the Newsnight) and for many companies. In other words she lived the lifestyle of the modern, educated career woman in the twenty-first century many in the West would approve. Throughout this period she remained very close to her family and visited her mother—who had, after the sudden death of Mr Hai, rolled up her sleeves, pulled up her socks, and made all the necessary sartorial adjustments, to bring up her young children—who continued to live in Wembley. She was therefore a witness to the hardening stance and ultra-religious beliefs, which her childhood friends, with whom she had truanted from school to go to clubs, came to adopt. There were times when she was assailed by doubts about the path she had chosen, and envied her childhood friends for their certitudes; many a time she felt unaccountably angry at her dead father, and blamed him for her feelings of self-doubt and uncertainty, as she struggled to find her place in the multicultural, multiracial Britain. In the end, though, she continued on the path she had chosen for herself and persisted with her personal belief-system. As the memoir ends we learn that Yasmin Hai is happily married to a Jewish American man and, for the first time in the twenty years since he died, is planning to visit her father’s grave.

Becoming British, The Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter is a delightful, compassionate, humorous and utterly captivating portrait of the realities of modern day Britain from the eyes of a child of an immigrant. It is a family chronicle, a social history, and an oblique commentary on the politics of those times—all rolled into one, throwing into sharp relief the dilemmas and problems of identity young people of immigrant stock are faced with on a daily basis. Above all, it is a story of a man, who was in awe of what he clearly felt was a superior culture, was grateful for having been given the opportunity to live in this country, and who made strenuous efforts to assimilate. In this Mr. Hai was probably not very different from other immigrants who arrived in this country in the 1960s to fill the labour shortage in Britain. They were all aware that they had to make extra efforts to fit in; in their minds they were perennial outsiders who were expected to be eternally appreciative of and thankful (and many did feel that way) for the benefits of living in England. That perhaps was also the reason why the generation of Mr Hai was able to take the casual racism, to which it was routinely exposed, on the chin and move on. Where Mr Hai was probably different from many other Muslim men of his generation was that he was not a religious man; indeed he would appear to have formed a very clear view in his mind that religion was the source of all the strife in the world. Almost twenty years after his death, his daughter discovered a very old article Mr Hai had written in a Pakistani magazine in the 1950s. This is what he had written:

‘.  . . unless we remove the blinkers of ‘religion’ from our eyes, we cannot take an enlightened and correct view of our predicament. Religion may act as a channel between an individual and his creator, but it has no place in state ideology or politics. Religion always encourages dogma and it has always been an irrational force. It has always denied validity of human reason. It has tried to understand the world by intuition rather than experience. It has always stood for authority against the individual.’

Having always held these views, Mr Hai, an educated man, had little pangs of guilt about removing religion from the lives of his British family. It is interesting that he was a member of the Communist party in Pakistan; however, when he decided to leave the country, he chose to come to England, which, whatever you might say about her, was not a Communist—not even a Socialist—country. That Mr Hai chose to live there for the next twenty odd years, until his death, without any apparent regrets, is, one can say, a proof, if proof be needed, that it was the full bellies and not nuclear weapons that ultimately defeated Communism. Had he lived a bit longer, Mr Hai would have witnessed the collapse of Communism all over the world.

The difference, one guesses, between the men of Mr Hai’s generation and the men and women from the next generation was that the younger generation was not prepared to accept the pervading racism in the British society with the phlegmatism of the community elders. For them there were no reference points such as the less than salubrious conditions and the poverty and other iniquities of the countries of their parents’ origins in comparison with which the frequent racism to which they were subjected in Britain, while unpleasant, was bearable. They were born and bred in this country and had not known anything else. The feelings of anomie, one would imagine, were very acute for this generation, a crippling sense that they did not belong. It is perhaps not surprising that some or more of them sought refuge in the orthodox Islam, which probably served the dual purpose of providing an anchor in lives which were otherwise drifting and of being an up yours gesture to the mainstream community. I suspect that a significant proportion of the young Muslim women who have chosen to wear the head-scarf or even the black chador, is not necessarily repressed by a medieval religion as clamoured by the right-wing, crypto-racist, brigade; these women are making a socio-political statement. That Yasmin Hai did not choose to go down this route is primarily down to her strength of character and self-belief, but you can’t help feeling that the seeds were sown by her liberal, non-religious father. Operation English was a success after all. 

9 / 11: We Shall Never Forget

It can’t be very easy these days if you were a Muslim living in the West. If you are, say, brown skinned; have a name like, thinking at random, Osama; have a flowing beard; and if you were, say, travelling, wearing a flowing robe with a rucksack on your shoulder, muttering under your breath—if you were, say, a religiously minded individual—whatever it is that religiously minded Muslims mutter under their breath, in a London underground, you shouldn’t at all be surprised if the carriage you are travelling in is less crowded than others.

You would find yourself (if you were a browned skinned Osama) in this situation because in the last decade or so, a stereotype of Islam (and Muslims—the two are not the same, as far as my understanding goes; the former is a religion, the latter denotes the followers) seems to have taken shape in the Western psyche, which goes something along these lines: religious fanatics, misogynists, terrorists, barbarians, not willing to assimilate and adopt Western values (democracy, liberalism etc.), and potential Fifth Element.

Then there are other terms coined such as Islamists—I am not entirely sure the origin of this term; it may have been originated in the West to denote those Muslims who fit into some or more of the above identifiers. (Martin Amis tried to make this distinction in his intemperate outburst against Muslims a few years ago.)

A few weeks ago I saw a Muslim woman on a bus I was travelling on, covered from head to toe in a black chador (the woman, not the bus; the bus was covered in dirt). As I tried to check out whether I could check out her ass, it struck me that it was precisely men like me that Muhammad probably had in mind when he decreed (would ‘suggested’ be a better word?) that women should hide their beauty behind a veil. The veil, Muhammad probably hoped (I hope I am not causing offence to anyone by daring to guess what the prophet hoped), would serve two purposes. The first is obvious. The veil would protect the woman from the dirty gaze of the lecher, although, come to think of it, would it, really? True, the lecher might not be able to check out vital statistics, but surely the woman would notice that she is being gazed at (I am pretty certain that they can see from behind veils, otherwise they would be bumping into lamp-posts all the time). (This assumption further assumes that women heartily disapprove of guys ogling them. A friend of mine recently returned from a weeklong holiday in Rome and declared disappointedly that Italian men of younger generation were nowhere as lewd as their fathers and grandfathers, because no one pawed her on the buses and no one spontaneously exclaimed ‘Carina!’ when she was walking on the streets. I felt it prudent not to point out to her (because I did not want to disappoint her further) that that was probably because she was 36 and they like them younger.)

Secondly (we are discussing, in case you have lost track, why Muhammad thought that a veil was a good idea), if the lecher had any sense in him he would realise the futility of leching and do something useful with his time (such as participating in the philosophical discussion of what is a just punishment for shoplifting: ASBO?, community service?, probation?, hand-chopping?). However, if the lecher happened to be living in the decadent and amoral Western society, there would be no pressure on him to change his infidel ways, as there would be plenty of infidel women displaying their goodies he could feast his eyes on.

Anyway, as it happened, the chador-clad woman and I got off at the same stop, and, funnily enough both entered the local mall (I swear I am not a stalker of chador-clad women). As it happened, I was behind the chador-clad woman, and walking—or should I say rolling along?— towards us in the opposite direction was a woman, pushing a pram in which was a squawking child, and three more children (some of whom, I hoped were hers), ranging in ages from two to six. The woman was not all that old, but the layers of make-up caked on her face were totally inadequate to conceal the toll taken by years of unhealthy living and eating habits, as was the top  (and pink bra) to conceal her mammaries. As she passed us, this fine specimen of British womanhood cleared her throat and shouted, ‘Oi Paki! Fuck off back. We don’t want you here.’ Then she walked on, her gut hanging over her leggings. The mall at that time was fairly crowded, and people walked on as if nothing had happened. This is something we Brits are very good at. We can give a master-class in how to present a poker face to the world. (This is not the only skill we have, it would appear. Last year I read a novel by the 2003 Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee. The narrator of this novel remarks at one point: ‘There is a certain English manner that infuriates me, that infuriates many people, where the insults come coated in pretty words, like sugar on a pill.’ So it seems our other talent lies in pissing people off by the way we speak. When we think we are being euphemistic or polite when we criticise, there is a chance that others see us as two-faced faced hypocrites.)

I thought about the incidence when I read an article in the Guardian about a children’s colouring book recently published in America.

What is so special about a children’s colouring book you may wonder.

Well, this book, published by a company called Real Book Coloring Books, purports to tell children, in a graphic form, about the attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequent hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

The book, the company declares, is created with ‘integrity, reverence, respect, and does not shy away from truth’.

And what is the truth? The truth, as the publisher, one Wayne Bell, eloquently explained on American television, is:

‘19 terrorist hijackers that came over here under the leadership of a devil worshipper, Osama bin Laden, to murder our people.’

The narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s novel should approve of Wayne Bell. Whatever else Bell may be accused of he can’t be accused of coating his insults in pretty words. He cannot be accused of subtlety or decency either. Nor can he be accused of giving undue importance to logic in his arguments. According to Bell it is an incontrovertible, undeniable truth that Osama was a devil worshipper. How did Bell find out that Osama was a devil worshipper? Did the devil confirm in writing that Osama was his follower?

As the Guardian article shows, one of the pages of this book, entitled, unsurprisingly, ‘We Shall Never Forget’, shows Osama hiding behind a chador clad woman while a US Navy Seal aims his rifle at him. Osama looks as if he is having an acute attack of gastritis. It is not easy to figure out the expression on the face of the woman, who is spreading her arms, giving, in the process, a good impression of a bat, but my guess is that she is not alarmed (or not having gastritis).

What takes the biscuit is the text that runs with it. It goes like this:

‘Being the elusive character that he was, and after hiding out with his terrorist buddies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, American soldiers finally locate the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.’

I don’t know to whom or to what the book, as the publishing company announced, is showing respect, but, if the above text is anything to go by, it is not showing much respect to grammar. The sentence, grammatically, is not just a car-crash, it is a multiple pile-up on a motorway.

In case the American children haven’t cottoned on to the message that Muslims are enemies of the state, the book goes on to inform:

‘Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.’

Islamic Muslim extremists? Who are they? They are ‘crazy people’ (unlike, I suppose, the publishers of the colouring book who come across as paragons of sense and moderation—oops! I should be careful; it wouldn't do to sugar-coat my insults with figures of speech) who hate freedom and obviously think syllogistically: we hate freedom; Americans are free (or FREE); so we hate Americans.

It goes without saying that what happened in September 2001 at the World Trade Centre was horrible. It is also true that (as a Tibor Fischer character might say) that there is little point in tournamentizing miseries; but the way the American (and frequently British) media go on and on about the 9/11 is enough to turn all healthy stomachs: as if this is the ultimate tragedy—the mother of all tragedies—against which all others pale into insignificance. When I last checked, in the history of humankind, so far, only one country dropped atomic bombs on another country in the full knowledge that tens of thousands of civilians would be vaporised; and that was not any of the countries of ‘Islamic Muslim Extremists’. I do not think any Muslim countries napalmed Vietnam and brought untold miseries to its people. To the best of my knowledge not a single Muslim country has illegally invaded and destroyed another country, as the Americans and British did in Iraq. And, if you go back in time, you will discover that the first ‘concentration camps’ in a war were run by the British in the Boer War.

I am currently reading a memoir entitled Four Girls from Berlin, of a Jewish American woman named Marianne Meyerhoff. The book tells the story of Meyerhoff’s mother, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and came to America (the rest of the family was not so lucky) and her friendship with three other (non-Jewish) German girls which survived the war and the Holocaust. Inevitably the book describes, in unflinching detail, the atmosphere of hatred stoked up by the Nazis against the Jews, which, as the 1930s wore on, affected many Germans, who, until that period, had existed peacefully with the Jews. Meyerhoff’s mother (who, despite living in America for decades, could never master the ‘foreign tongue’ and preferred to speak in her native German) used a German word to describe what was happening in Germany at the time. ‘The Nazis took over,’ she said, ‘and we began to feel, in our bones, Gleichschaltung.’  

Meyerhoff requested her mother to translate Gleichschaltung into English. The mother had to consult her German-English dictionary and discovered that the word, like many other German words, packed in complicated concepts for which there was no equivalent word in English, and could be translated into it only by a long, train-car type, series of words. This was how Gleichschaltung was translated into English:

‘The forced and mindless joining in lockstep with the crowd.’

One hopes that the indecent, disrespectful (and agrammatical) children’s colouring book and its message—despite the protestations of the publishers—full of distortions, crude generalizations, lies and xenophobia, which tries to demonize a section of its society, are not a symptom of an underlying sick society. (There is always the possibility that the Guardian goes out of its way to ferret out fringe happenings and publishes them, which gives an opportunity to people like me to feel outraged about.)