“He supposed he was only one of several million persons of his generation who had grown up and, somewhere around thirty, made the upsetting discovery that life wasn't going to pan out the way you'd always expected it would; and why this realization should have thrown him and not them—or not too many of them—was something he couldn't fathom. Life offered none of those prizes you'd been looking forward to since adolescence (he less than others, but looking forward to them all the same, if only out of curiosity). Adulthood came through with none of the pledges you'd been led somehow to believe in; the future still remained the future-illusion; a non-existent period of constantly-receding promise, hinting fulfillment, yet forever withholding the rewards. All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all. It was a mug's game and there ought to be a law. But there wasn't any law, there was no rhyme or reason; and with the sour-grapes attitude of “Why the hell should there be”—which is as near as you ever came to sophistication—you retired within yourself and compensated for the disappointment by drink, by subsisting on daydreams, by living in a private world of your own making (hell or heaven, what did it matter?), by accomplishing or becoming in fancy what you could never bring about in fact.”

 - Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

Some thoughts on Renu's Mare Gaye Gulfam

First a brief summary of what happens in the story:

At the beginning of the story Hiraman, an ox-cart driver, picks up a mysterious lady passenger and starts to feel that something unusual is afoot because he hasn't ever had this experience before. We also come to know of his past experiences as the ox-cart driver, specially his two vows - never to transport smuggled goods or bamboo! As the story progresses we come to know that the lady passenger's name is Hirabai and she is the lead dancer of a nautanki company. She is actually headed to a local fair where she will perform in the show for the company. During the journey Hiraman tells her the tragic story of "mahua ghatwarin." The subtext of all this is that Hiraman slowly starts getting infatuated with her which actually results in some amusing and dramatic scenes when she actually reaches the fair and starts performing in the show as his infatuated sense of her image clashes with the reality of her image that other people have of her. Finally in the end, his heart is broken when she leaves by train for the next show. He swears the third vow never to take a dancer as a passenger.

Things I love about the story:

I absolutely love the initial section of the story where Renu brilliantly uses the technique of free indirect style to get inside the consciousness of Hiraman and shows what is going on inside him as he tries to make sense of his own emotional reactions to his passenger. The genius of Renu lies in showing that even though Hiraman is illiterate - he may not know any highfalutin metaphors; he may not know any standard romantic idioms, he may even lack a sense of self-awareness - but his inner life is still complex and interesting. He has his own metaphors, his own symbols (culled from the local folk traditions) with which he makes sense of his experiences and gives a shape to them. This may look different from a conventional love story but the underlying romantic sensibility is the same and it is so because this romantic sensibility is an essential characteristic of human life. An illiterate ox-cart driver working in some godforsaken isolated land can also have a heart which aches! He also has his own means to make sense of (if not express) this heartache. This is the true genius of the story.

The Confession (1970)

Wow! After a long time saw something which stirred me deeply. Yves Montand is one of my favourite actors and he is just brilliant here. The concluding montage was specially very effective - almost spine chilling.

A relevant excerpt from Tony Judt's Postwar:

Why, after all, did the Soviet dictator need trials at all? Moscow was in a position to eliminate anyone it wished, anywhere in the Soviet bloc, through ‘administrative procedures’, Trials might seem counter-productive; the obviously false testimonies and confessions, the unembarrassed targeting of selected individuals and social categories, were hardly calculated to convince foreign observers of the bona fides of Soviet judicial procedures.

But the show trials in the Communist bloc were not about justice. They were, rather, a form of public pedagogy-by-example; a venerable Communist institution (the first such trials in the USSR dated to 1928) whose purpose was to illustrate and exemplify the structures of authority in the Soviet system. They told the public who was right, who wrong; they placed blame for policy failures; they assigned credit for loyalty and subservience; they even wrote a script, an approved vocabulary for use in discussion of public affairs. Following his arrest Rudolf Slánský was only ever referred to as ‘the spy Slánský’, this ritual naming serving as a form of political exorcism.

Show trials—or tribunals, in the language of Vyshinsky’s 1936 Soviet Manual of Criminal Investigation—were explicitly undertaken for the ‘mobilisation of proletarian public opinion’. As the Czechoslovak ‘Court Organisation Act’ of January 1953 baldly summed it up, the function of the courts was ‘to educate the citizens in devotionand loyalty toward the Czechoslovak Republic, etc.’ Robert Vogeler, a defendant at a Budapest trial in 1948, noted at the time: ‘To judge from the way our scripts were written, it was more important to establish our allegorical identities than it was to establish our “guilt”. Each of us, in his testimony, was obliged to “unmask” himself for the benefit of the Cominform Press and the radio.’

The accused were reduced from presumptive political critics or opponents to a gaggle of unprincipled conspirators, their purposes venal and traitorous. The clumsiness of Soviet imperial style sometimes masks this objective—what is one to make of a rhetoric designed to mobilize public opinion in metropolitan Budapest by reiterating the errors of those who opposed ‘the struggle against the kulaks’? But the ‘public’ were not being asked to believe what they heard; they were merely being trained to repeat it.

One use of the public trials was to identify scapegoats. If Communist economic policy was not producing its pre-announced successes, if Soviet foreign policy was blocked or forced to compromise, someone must take the blame. How else were the mis-steps of the infallible Leader to be explained? There were many candidates: Slánský was widely disliked inside and outside the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Rajk had been a harsh Stalinist interior minister. And precisely because they had carried out unpopular policies now seen to have failed, any and all Communist leaders and ministers were potential victims in waiting. Just as defeated political critics or opponents to a gaggle of unprincipled conspirators, their purposes venal and traitorous. The clumsiness of Soviet imperial style sometimes masks this objective—what is one to make of a rhetoric designed to mobilize public opinion in metropolitan Budapest by reiterating the errors of those who opposed ‘the struggle against the kulaks’? But the ‘public’ were not being asked to believe what they heard; they were merely being trained to repeat it.

One use of the public trials was to identify scapegoats. If Communist economic policy was not producing its pre-announced successes, if Soviet foreign policy was blocked or forced to compromise, someone must take the blame. How else were the mis-steps of the infallible Leader to be explained? There were many candidates: Slánský was widely disliked inside and outside the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Rajk had been a harsh Stalinist interior minister. And precisely because they had carried out unpopular policies now seen to have failed, any and all Communist leaders and ministers were potential victims in waiting. Just as defeated generals in the French Revolutionary wars were frequently charged with treason, so Communist ministers confessed to sabotage when the policies they had implemented failed—often literally—to deliver the goods.
The advantage of the confession, in addition to its symbolic use as an exercise in guilt-transferal, was that it confirmed Communist doctrine. There were no disagreements in Stalin’s universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin’s virtues and identify his enemies’ crimes. They also illuminate the extent of Stalin’s paranoia and the culture of suspicion that surrounded him. One part of this was a deep-rooted anxiety about Russian, and more generally ‘Eastern’ inferiority, a fear of Western influence and the seduction of Western affluence. In a 1950 trial in Sofia of ‘The American Spies in Bulgaria’, the accused were charged with propagating the view ‘that the chosen races live only in the West, in spite of the fact that geographically they have all started from the East’. The indictment went on to describe the accused as exhibiting ‘a feeling for servile under-valuation’ that Western spies had successfully exploited.