The famous Mall Road connects the Cantonment area to almost all the major towns and boulevards of the Metropolitan. (The City still has a long, long journey to complete to be truly known as a ‘Cosmopolitan’.) Thanks for the very dual carriageway – with a lush mixed cluster of Pepal, Amaltas, Mahwa, Ticoma, Gul-e-mohar, and Kachnar trees for a green belt (wide dividing strip) – for, it will also take you to the Old City in < 45 odd minutes – provided you don’t travel during the rush hours; provided the weather, power supply, traffic lights, and traffic wardens behave themselves.
On the way to the Old City, you find an assortment of classic and (post-)modern iconic buildings – from The British Raj Era, too – on either side of the 8–10 km long stretch: Governor’s House, Alhamra Arts Council, Aitchison College, National College of Arts, Museum, Cathedral Church of Resurrection, Masonic Temple, Bagh-e-Jinnah, et cetera. … The Bagh-e-Jinnah (formerly: Lawrence Gardens) is also a home to a 150-year-old tree – Banyan (a hybrid of Banyan branches + Karnikar branches (Kanaka Champa)). … And, if you happen to be an aficionado of history/architecture/arts, you can easily become overwhelmed by the (colour) schemata of the (post-)colonial portrait that the very route happens to be; you can easily find yourself teleported to the late 19th–early 20th century CE—when the iconic (London’s) red double-decker buses were also in service in conjunction with the tonga service. Back in the 1930s–40s, the City of Lavapuri/City of Gardens1 offered an exemplar landscape of (the British/European) modernity.
*
This past Summer of ’23 CE, I had had to make the journey – via the very boulevard – to my grand/parents’ ancestral town called Islampura (formerly: Krishan/Sant Nagar) to re-procure a clay spinning top from an old seller of old clay toys. Reason being: the helper had managed to break one from the pair that sat atop my workstation in the study at my place, while she also left the assortment of my journals, fountain pens, ink pots, poem scribbles, pen pouches/holders, lead/mechanical pencils, pair of mechanical keyboards, marble paperweights, cigarette/case + lighters, metal/wood ashtrays, ceramic incense burner, A3/A5 sticky notes, and books hither and thither.
The clay toy can be easily classified as a souvenir in today’s IT/AI Age. I doubt, if the contemporary generations – Generation Z & Generation Alpha – are even aware of its existence, let alone being aware of where to acquire one. … The clay toy is even far, far older than the times when my grand/parents used to play with it in the streets – laid with bricks made of clay.
*
I’m yet to learn to properly operate it – wrap the thin string around its top, middle, bottom; then, with a flick of the wrist unleash the spinning top so as to induce a hundred or so anti/clockwise rotations to it per release.
Every now ‘n then, I manually make the souvenir whirl on the palm of my left hand – wrong-hand – with a musical adaptation (remix) of رقص ذرات / “Poem of the Atoms” by Jalal al-Din Balkhi (Rumi) playing in the background via YouTube:
O’ Day, rise! So that the particles begin their dance
1Lavapuri (Sanskrit): According to the Hindu tradition/mythology, the City of Prince Lava/Loh – son of God Rama and Goddess Sita (see the Hindu epic poem Ramayana by Valmiki (Adi Kavi/First Poet). Modern day Lahore – the capital city of the Punjab province in Pakistan.
[1]e=mc2: Theory of Special Relativity by A. Einstein (1905 CE) – with an emphasis upon: a) ‘inertial frames’ (speed of light is constant), and b) merger of space and time; where, time = 4th dimension.
[2] The Theory of General Relativity by A. Einstein (1917 CE): ‘Gravity’ is a result of the shape of space-time/geometry of the universe.
[3] The Three Laws of Motion by Sir I. Newton (1687 CE): Principle of Inertia, Principle of Momentum, and Principle of Action/Reaction.
[4] The Theory of Special Relativity proposed by G. Galilei (1632 CE): the laws of motion remain the same in all ‘inertial frames of references’ (objects moving at a constant speed).
[5] The Sun-centric Astronomical Model proposed by N. Copernicus (1543 CE) – opposed to the 2nd century CE Geocentric Model (Earth at the centre) by C. Ptolemaeus.
[6]Buraq (Islamic tradition): Chimera (with a body of horse, head of human, and wings).
Biography
(Wordcount: 153)
Saad Ali (b. 1980 CE in Okara, Pakistan) has been brought up and educated in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. He is a bilingual poet-philosopher and literary translator. His new collection of poems is titled Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021). He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrastic poetry and micro/flash fictions into Urdu: Lorette C. Luzajic: Selected Ekphrases: Translated into Urdu (2023). He is a regular contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. He has had poems published in Synchronized Chaos. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. He has had ekphrases showcased at an Art Exhibition, Bleeding Borders, curated at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie in Alberta, Canada. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Ovid, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Kafka, and Tagore. He enjoys learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities/towns on foot. To learn further about his work, please visit: www.saadalipoetry.com; www.facebook.com/owlofpines.
Saturday night
she wears her
pressed-flower face
which came first
her madness
or her art
behind me
phantom shadow
with a fist
round faces
built of cubes
featured in
rectangular galleries
with oval windows
I tell complete strangers
about my pain . . .
climate despair
Swiss-cheese memory . . .
glimpses of past weddings
some of them hers
Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, Iowa, USA
Bio: Roberta Beach Jacobson (she/her) is drawn to the magic of words–poetry, song lyrics, flash fiction, puzzles, and stand-up comedy. Her latest book is Demitasse Fiction: One-Minute Reads for Busy People (Alien Buddha Press, 2023).
Weightlifter’s Dilemma, or Upon Looking at a Surrealist painting by Andrew Ferez
(Photo above is of a clown’s face with purple curly hair and white face paint and a big nose suspended above a desk with a microphone)
What the body lifts and carries Around like a second skin It sooner memorizes the weight As it grows inured to the pain
Clowns must be the unborn Children of Sisyphus, smile Despite and in spite of –if they only Knew art is more than a discipline
Takes a while for the heart to catch up When it does, it surrenders the key To a floodgate that opens at three Next thing you know, each morning
The heart wakes up in a circus tent Of acrobats juggling heavy objects Handles them like they’re made of air Who cares about weightlifting clowns? ——- Biographical note:
Emeniano Acain Somoza, Jr. considers himself the official spiritual advisor of his roommates, Gordot and Dwight – the first a goldfish, the other a Turkish Van cat. His works have been published in The Poetry Magazine, Moria Poetry Journal, Fogged Clarity, Everyday Poem, Loch Raven Review, The Buddhist Poetry Review, The Philippines Free Press, Troubadour 21, Full of Crow, Indigo Rising, Asia Writes, Triggerfish Critical Review, Troubadors 21, Gloom Cupboard, TAYO, Haggard & Halloo, and elsewhere. His first book, A Fistful of Moonbeams, was published by Kilmog Press in April 2010. His second, Kleenex Theory, published by Createspace-Amazon, came out in 2015. He is busy anthologizing emptiness and boredom at the moment.
THE ROLE OF DIGITAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CASHLESS PLASTIC CARDS IN BANKS
Lapasova is the daughter of Marguba Zakir
Student of the Jizzakh branch of the National University of Uzbekistan
lapasovamarguba04@gmail.com
Phone: (90)-488-76-70
Abstract: The article contains a number of points regarding the analysis of the implementation of cashless settlements in commercial banks of Uzbekistan.
Keywords: Plastic cards, digital technologies, mobile banking, SMS-banking, Bank-Client, retail banking services, banking system.
Enter. Currently, the process of opening plastic cards to customers is quickly prepared by commercial banks in our country through modern (EISA) programs.
The main part. In the conditions of financial globalization, the competition between banks to attract large corporate clients has increased, and the market of banking services in Uzbekistan is becoming one of the promising areas of ensuring bank income and competitiveness. At the moment, retail services occupy a special place in the market of banking services, and they are mainly aimed at satisfying the population's demand for financial and banking services. It is known that retail banking services are distinguished by a number of features, in particular, individuals are the main consumers, although the volume of transactions is small, the costs are higher compared to corporate banking services, and the services are aimed at meeting personal requirements. The President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev Miromonovich stated in his address to the Oliy Majlis that "wide implementation of digital technologies in the activities of banks will be in the center of our attention." The volume of retail banking services provided by commercial banks of our Republic is increasing year by year. The number of deposits intended for the population is increasing, the volume of operations with plastic cards is increasing, the practice of issuing consumer and mortgage loans is improving.
Resolution 2751 of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan dated February 2, 2017 "to further encourage the development of the cashless settlement system, to meet the demands for plastic cards, terminals and related equipment, as well as non-bank transfer of funds special attention is focused on reducing turnover
of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan " On additional measures for the further development of the cashless payment system based on plastic cards " No. PQ-433 of August 3, 2006 is provided at the beginning of the second letter of paragraph 1 to extend the period of validity of customs privileges until January 1, 2020.
Bank microprocessor plastic cards, manufacturers of payment terminals, processing centers of retail payment systems are effective from imported raw materials, consumables and components, software tools and licenses for the production of plastic cards, terminals, ATMs, infokiosks and other equipment. and ensure strictly targeted use and calculations by means of these, and in the future their production should be localized.
Also, the regulations on non-cash payments in the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Civil Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan, "On the Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan", "On Banks and Banking Activities" and in accordance with the laws "On Payments and Payment Systems" in the Republic of Uzbekistan, the procedure for making cashless settlements of legal entities and individuals using payment documents is established. One of the most widely used types of retail banking services today is plastic card services. Plastic cards have their advantages for banks and citizens. Also, today, making payments for various products and services through the Internet and electronic systems is becoming more and more sophisticated. The widespread use of plastic cards and mobile communication is creating the basis for the development of the sector. In particular, the use of information and communication technologies in areas such as consumer credit, remittances, and deposit operations is at an initial stage. It is also important to study foreign experience in further expansion of plastic card services. Looking at the foreign experience of plastic card services. This type of payment has been used in the Australian banking and financial system for more than twenty years.
Over the past years, a lot of experience has been accumulated in this regard. Innovative ideas were introduced to the industry. As of today, the number of plastic cards in circulation is 6 per person. 6 issued plastic cards for each working population corresponds to ta. Credit cards are used within the specified limit, and the debt incurred through the plastic card is returned to the customer within a convenient time. International "Visa", "MasterCard" and "American Express" bank credit cards are mainly used in Australia. In recent years, as a result of the decrease in the demand for cash and the expansion of cashless payments, the number of payment terminals installed in sales and service outlets in the country is increasing significantly. In our country, as a result of the development of the settlement system through plastic cards, the demand for cash is decreasing year by year. In particular, in comparison to 2018-2019, there is an increase in the number of people carrying out operations and sales through bank plastic cards.
Summary. The development of bank card transactions, the possibility of introducing a scoring credit system, the gradual development of services such as "internet-banking", "mobile-banking", "SMS-banking", and the improvement of services such as money transfers and electronic payment in our republic determines the prospects for the development of retail banking services.
Useful literature:
1. "Economy and innovative technologies" scientific electronic magazine. No. 1, January-February , 2014
2. Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan on the strategy of actions for the development of the Republic of Uzbekistan in 2017-2021
3. Bekchanov M., Abdurakhmanov R. Plastic card - a modern means of settlement. // Market, Money and Credit. No. 9. 2012.B.14
4. Abduvakhidov F. Accounting in commercial banks./ Study manual. - T.: "ECONOMY-FINANCE", 2012 - y.
Through the lonely roads
My heart flickers like a light bulb
The pain strikes in voltages
My blood runs completely cold,
As i look into the palms of death with empty eyes
With smeared ghosts of human imprints
Just a few o'clocks from midnight
And a few still till the beauty of the heavens rises
I've motioned fiercely,
On the deadly roads of gruesome art,
Spills of blood from rage and tears from empathy
Mourning songs from the night creatures
And exotic smells from nature
Flooded with the overwhelming need to run panic stricken
Like a frightened deer, so afraid
My feet glue to the ground
My heart flickers even more, startled
And i feel my hairs stand on end
holding erect until i let out a scream
Do i give up? Do i not ?
My memories all are labyrinths
I do not seem to find an escape
I nip at a canteen of courage and tell myself not to panic
Will i not?
Perhaps i said i was a woman too quickly,
Because i feel like a little girl
As the sun slips into the afternoon sky,
I keep telling myself not to panic
But i begin to shout but my own voice mocks me
In echoes bouncing off the walls of this dungeon that surrounds me
Just another series of fraught shouts, bringing nothing but my echo
My cries, my screams, my fear
They don't make me
Though sheer the climb is, hands, feet, like claws
I will work my way up like a spider
The sound of my own breathing and grunting is so loud it startles me
Ayanda Edna Dlanga is a young poet with a dream of becoming an acclaimed author. Fueled with a lifelong love for storytelling and expressing emotions as they are.
The Rite of Spring, by Pina Bausch (Photo: Maarten Vanden Abeele)
The Blood Wedding of the Earth
common ground(s)
The Rite of Spring
Cal Performances
Zellerbach Hall
When Stravinsky composed Le sacre de printemps, and Nijinsky first choreographed it, for a notorious Paris premiere served with a heavy helping of riot and hysterics, one would be forgiven for guessing that things African were hanging in the air at the time. After all, Picasso had for years been inspired by the masks of Africa in drawings, sculpture and paintings such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon, already famous, and the cubism that commanded much of the Parisian artworld had deeply African roots.
But who would have guessed it would take until the 2020s, by way of a brilliantly original German choreographer and her adventurous son, in tandem with a Senegalese dance school and an echt-British performance company, to, at last, fully manifest the profound Africanness of one of the anchoring works of European modernism?
Well, sometimes even this world rises to justice. And the inspired synthesis of Stravinsky’s controlled howl, Pina Bausch’s relentless choreography, and the brave and brilliant talents of 38 young dancers from 14 African countries was made fully and bracingly manifest in Berkeley, thanks to Cal Performances, over a recent mid-February weekend.
Pina Bausch originally choreographed the piece on her own company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, in 1975, and anyone who saw Wim Wenders’ seminal film Pina will remember the triumphant work of her dancers. But seeing the same moves on the bodies of African dancers feels so apt, so right, it seems astonishing no one has done it before now.
The visceral, chthonic thrill of the piece is impossible to capture on page or screen without tearing both to pieces and rearranging the fragments into a vital and dazzling chaos that begins in sleep and ends in a death whose colossal significance is the resurrection of the earth itself. At the heart of the piece, we are in a pre-verbal world of ritual, fear, and hope, a dramatic myth whose logic is that of life itself, hinging as it does on death for it to be born at all.
The celebrated Senegalese dancer and teacher Germaine Acogny, who appeared in the accompanying piece common ground(s), is quoted in the program notes as saying, “When I first saw Pina’s Rite of Spring, I felt it was an African rite.” She goes on to say she was impressed by how many of the moves within the dance reminded her of those native to African dance, and the entire aura of the work feels intimately African “because it is something universal.”
The piece is fundamentally a group effort; there are no solos as such until the very end, when the Chosen One (an exquisitely vulnerable Khadija Cisse) dances for long agonizingly suspenseful minutes as she seems literally to dance herself to death before our eyes – it is the one conclusion to Le sacre this viewer has seen in which I believed the dancer might this time actually expire at the end.
Other standouts included a princess who effortlessly led the young women, Shelly Ohene-Nyako, and a king-in-waiting, Bazoumana Kouyaté, who dominated among the men. But the sharp coordination of the dancers as a group in a piece that flirts with chaos in the only way that works artistically – by keeping it under complete control – was a truly strange thrill to behold. Full justice was done to Bausch’s conception, if what I recall from Wenders’ film, which, sadly, was filmed just after Bausch’s death, was a fair expression of it. For me, this performance was the crowning of a work of unique artistic power.
The production, from the Pina Bausch Foundation, the École des Sables, of Senegal (and co-founded by Germaine Acogny), and Sadler’s Wells of London, and the program of which it is a part, was initiated by Foundation chair Salomon Bausch as part of a “transmission project” to keep alive and relevant the work of Pina Bausch after her untimely death in 2009. Its planned premiere in 2020 at the Théâtre National Daniel Serano in Dakar was canceled due to the pandemic, but it refused to be kept down, and was finally premiered two years later and came to the United States recently on a tour that began in New York and ended in Berkeley.
A side note about the production: following Bausch’s original conception, the dance was performed on a layer of peat that had to be spread by a small army of stagehands across a large tarpaulin laid out across the stage during intermission. It came from Canada and had to be carried from city to city throughout the tour. It is an essential part of the dance: by the end of the work, the dancers are partly covered by it in a sign of their marriage to the earth and its perpetual cycle of life and death: it is both life ritual and death ritual, wedding and funeral, a digging of graves and the cradling of a child.
The first half of the program included a piece for two female dancers: common ground(s), performed by two legends, the afore-mentioned Germaine Acogny and a dancer who worked with Bausch at the beginning of the latter’s career, Malou Airaudo. The work was a simple but profound meditation on female friendship and the life of women. The senior dancers make no pretense to virtuosity, but instead emphasize their wisdom, maturity and groundedness in the daily and annual cycles of life and growth. At one point they speak, in French and English, before returning to the wordless eloquence of dance and the rites of daily life. The music was by Fabrice Bouillon LaForest, performed on strings and keyboard but evoking the sounds of Africa and the earth, cicadas, winged creatures, and animals in the night. It was a work of peace only to be broken by the eruption of spring.
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent books are the first stories in the “Otherwise” series for middle-grade readers: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia.
“Tagore’s philosophical and spiritual thoughts transcends all limits of language, culture and nationality.” Discuss with reference to the poems you have read from Gitanjali.
Gitanjali Song Offerings is poignantly immemorial literature by the oriental mystic visionary avatar laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This anthology is phenomenally devotional poetry indulging in the poetic aesthetics in order to chant and showcase the recital and versification for the passion of the love of God. The choruses musings evokes invocation as relatable to intense emotionalism associated with motifs and symbolisms excerpted from devotional tradition such as mysticism and / or spirituality blended to finest transcreation of pristine purity in the Bengali vernacular transcendentally sung throughout the Bengal presidency bridging the gulf between
the wester and the oriental poetry —bejewelled with ornamental adorations, crowned with priceless stones and precious metals, especially effulgent in efflorescence of sensual imageries, subtleties embodied within intricacies and obscurities of the Westerners/ Europeans like dewy crystals and still water, the most crystalline and most perfect medium of thought associations and word imageries whether diaphanous texture, musical quality, plasticity, glamour as if “unites th mellifluousness of Italian with the power posses by German of rendering complex ideas” unravelling the veil of maya and dispelling the illusions of the world. Gitanjali is bereft of polarities, binaries and antitheses in the trajectories of constraints and restraints, animosities and hostilities, conventionalities and disparities, dichotomies and dogmas. The bittersweet pastorales of the Georgian poets are substituted by the revelations in the lyrics of Gitanjali as contemporary blank verse of translation literature within the sprawl frowning “London bridge is falling down falling down falling down.” Emergence of evolutionary poetics superimposes the metamorphoses of Indianization in the Whitmanian whispers of the Heavenly Death enshrine the recluse mystique Tagore by transfiguration and /or transvaluation towards attainment of charismatic angelicism and divine evangelicalism.
Rabindranath Tagore embellishes the grandiose affair of literary craftsmanship in Gitanjali through figurative speeches as evidenced by symbolic imageries which tend to be illustrative, emotive, evocative, decorative and ornamental. “I simply felt an urge to recapture, through the medium of another language, the feelings and sentiments which had created such a feast of joy within me in present days”. Tagore wanted to recapture the aesthetic poetic mood of the native tongue[Bengali vernacular] in the English tongue with all the splendour and beauty of that recollection or memorialization. Tagore distinguishes translation to be word for word transference from one language to another while rewriting to be sense for sense transference that leads to rebirth or reincarnation of the original in the target language interwoven by the “essential substance” of the unfathomable, mysterious and poetic core of the original. Jacques Derrida’s translation theory restitutes translation to be original creative work: “It is a productive writing called forth by the original text” that leaves the reader as much alone as is possible and moves the author towards him. Buddhadev Bose is so moved by its ‘miraculous transformation’ in the English language that he calls it as “the work of a great English poet.” Rabindranath Tagore explains transliteration in the Evening Post in New York on 9 December 1916: “The English versions of my poems are not literal translations. When poems are changed from one language to another, they acquire a new quality and a new spirit, ideas get a new birth and are reincarnated.” Tagore produced effortlessly and endlessly words and melodies at the same time through poetic talent and musical erudition and knowledge of the vernacular [mother tongue and native language] as a cosmopolitan internationalist aficionado and pastoral visionary mystique have endowed incarnation of life giving deity. In other words, mystical universal serenity of life-giving force has been recreated by retranslation of Gitanjali’s verses dismantling and disgruntling preconceptions, misunderstandings, dust and cobwebs.
“Light, oh where is the light! Kindle with the burning fire of desire! It thunders and the wind rushes screaming through the void. The night is black as a black stone. Let not the hours pass by in the dark. Kindle the lamp of love with thy life.” [Gitanjali verses 27]
“In the early morning thou wouldst call me from my sleep like my own comrade and lead me running from glade to glade. Only my voice took up the tunes, and my heart danced in their cadence. The world with eyes bent upon thy feet stands in awe with all its silent stars.” [Gitanjali verses 97]
Further Reading
May Sinclair’s The “Gitanjali” : Or Song-Offerings of Rabindranath Tagore, The North American Review, May 1983, Volume 197, No. 390, pp. 659-676, University of Northern Iowa
Mary M. Lago’s [University of Missouri] Tagore in Translation: A Case Study in Literary Exchange, Books Abroad, Summer 1972, Volume 46, No. 3, pp. 416-421, Board of the Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Radhey L. Varshney’s Tagore’s Imagery, indian Literature, May-June 1979, Volume 22, No. 3, Aspects of Modern Poetry, pp. 86-96, Sahitya Akademi
Subhas Dasgupta’s Tagore’s Concept of Translation: A Critical Study, Indian Literature, May-June 2012, pp. 132-144, Sahitya Akademi
Viktore Ivubulis’s Reviewed Works: Rabindranath Tagore: Reclaiming a Cultural Icon By Kathleen M. O’ Connell and Joseph T. O’ Connell, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2010, Volume 17, No. 2, pp. 326-328, University of Cambridge Press on behalf of School of Oriental and African Studies
Hanne-Ruth Thompson’s Reviewed Work: Gitanjali, A New Translation with an Introduction by William Radice by Rabindranath Tagore, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2012, Volume 75, No. 1, pp. 183-185, Cambridge University Press on behalf of the School of Oriental and African Studies
Bimla’s journey from self-absorption to self-realization involves a painful recognition of the limitations of her conjugal life. Do you agree or disagree with the statement? Explicate.
Or
“This is a wonderful story, a story where passages must be read and reread so that you may savour their imagery, their language and their wisdom.” Examine Anita Desai’s novel in the vein of this critical comment with references to the heroic aspirations of the protagonist.
Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day embodies and interweaves postcolonial/thirdworld/subaltern literature with themes such as loss of innocence, loss of identity, loss of culture, loss of customs, loss of tradition, loss of language and quest for identity and postcolonial resistance within the discourses and ideologies of contemporary cultural premises and associated Indianness. Krishna’s dance dramaturgy and the theatricality of the cowgirls of Vrindavan inferences/references to the adulterous love-making by the Jamuna riverbed allusive of ubiquitous themes Hindustani culture which encompasses medieval lyrics of sudras and miras, paintings and sculptures of Radha and Krishna stationed in divine destinations, Indian classical and folk music and finally echelon of Indian films and film songs. Herein after religious ecstasy, communal fraternity, pastoral harmony, sexual freedom, equanimity of women reclaim the overwhelming plenitude as suggested by Sudhir Kakar, “In psychological terms, he [Krishna] encourages the individual to identify with the ideal primal self, released from all social and superego constraints. Krishna’s dream is like that of Dionysus in ancient Greece, is one of utter freedom and instinctual exhilaration.” Anita Desai suggests that explicit sexuality of Krishna and Radha is no exhilarating feat as allegorized by the revelries and merriments beckoning the Misra sisters, Jaya and Sarla. “The poor Misra sisters so gray and bony and needle-faced, still prancing through their Radha Krishna dances and impersonating in order to earn their living” […] the cathartic plight of these love-lorn maidens have extinguished “ecstasy”, “fluidity” and “gracefulness” from their lives to be atoned by “attainment of the infinite” and the “absolute bliss in the Brahminical.”
Bakul snobbish diplomat of the Indian consulate and mission in Washington, wedded to Tara afterlife of holocaust and post partition era expounds bureaucratic language: “What I feel is my duty, my vocation, when I am abroad, is to be my country’s ambassador […] I refuse to talk about famine or droughts, or caste wars or political disputes […] I choose to show them and inform them of one of the best, the finest.” The refinement and polishness of the exquisite nationalist culture that government agencies proliferate their demagoguery and propaganda machinery with the purposiveness of freezing their pastness in missions abroad such as New York and Moscow. Anita Desai furthermore satirizes the historiography of Indianness uncovering the themes of patricide, fratricide, religious bigotry, partition, exodus and migration and patriarchal misogyny. Obliteration and extinction of Islamic culture and Urdu literature is revealed in the relinquishment of Raja’s abjuration of educational ventures in Islamic Studies at Jamia Milia and the ironical lost effulgence of his sisters in re-enacting Urdu verses. Anita Desai imitates and mirrors transfigured self-sacrificial sentimentalist heroines popularized by the stalwarts of Bengali literature as evidenced by the assertion of Bimla: “I shall work —– I shall do
anything —– I shall earn my own living —–and look after Mira Masi and Baba —– and be independent.” Bimla absconds singularity with Dr. Biswas and leads a virgin life by radicalizing herself through boldness in subverting stereotypical femininity—–empowered self-hood dismantling the culture specific of gender femininity as object of guilt and pity [heroine who remains to be unappreciated by ungrateful family and ends up in sanatorium].
Despite Bimla’s face “dried clay that had cracked” resonating subtleties of indifferences in perspectives or outlook, there is affinity of togetherness with her and Tara’s binaries divested apart during the parting farewell of the American immigrants family. “Old Delhi is a cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves” reanimates the graphic narrative of these dilapidated ruinous state of the locales and settings despised and detested in the stream-of-consciousness of the mentee whom Bimla tutors. Parenthood and caretaking of the diseased and even burial and cremation of deceased bodies and bereaved souls were incumbencies of befallen upon the protagonist. Abandoned in a forlorn macabre she was living a damnable hectic life except the accompaniment and association of the neurosis and psychosis patient brother Baba listening to “Lili Marlene” and “Don’t Fence Me” on the antique gramophone.” Desai is striving to universalize the predicament of the hypersensitive feminine temperament into a kind of existential crisis and feminine vulnerability and frangible decadence. Self-introspection, spontaneity, plainness, brusqueness, altruistism and simple living high thinking reinforces her claustrophobic life to be reining in the newfound adulthood as Raja evades siblinghood responsibilities and familial obligations, she venerates herself to devotional fulfillment of promising family caregiving associated with the rent to be paid […] the people to be fed everyday, Tara to be married off, and Baba to be taken care of for the rest of his life.” Dr. Biswas’s assertion takes the cudgels for the testimonial: “Now I understand why I do not wish to marry […] You have sacrificed your own life for them [family].” Frustrated and enraged, Bimla interposes being “misunderstood and misread”. The headstrong and eccentric sprinterish lady History college lecturer, Bimla has become nonchalant in incidental events whether allocating funds in seed banks aftermath of the garden being fertilized by dumping manure or professing consent to the matrimonial alliance of the family physician. Messy, festering, disturbing and scathing domesticity however, transforms this self-absorbed heroic protagonist in banishment of past grievances through reading of Aurangzeb’s epitaphic requiem: “Many were around me when I was born, but now I am going alone. I know not why I am or wherefore I came into the world. Life is transient and the lost moment never comes back. Now I am going alone. Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences of it with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin.”
Bimla’s reminiscences reflect a feminist consciousness: her desperate frustration with the limitations placed on her as a feminine personae and her fierce haughtiness to be unencumbered by marriage. “I won’t marry…I shall work—-I shall do things—-I shall earn my own living, and look after Mira Masi and Baba, and be independent.” Bimla venerated her private pantheon of saints and goddesses in the emulation of Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc as archetypal exemplary feminist revolutionaries. As a feminist heroine, Bimla explores the issues of freedom of choice in whether to marry or to remain a bachelorette and of
independence vs subservience, thereby questioning the “conventional associations of gender and behaviour.”
Further Reading
Arun. P Mukherjee’s Other Worlds, Other Texts: Teaching Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day to Canadian Students, College Literature, February 1995, Volume 22, No. 1, pp. 192-201
Shouri Daniel’s Reviewed Works: CLear Light of Day by Anita Desai, Chicago Review, Summer 1981, Volume 33, No. 1, pp. 107-112.
Renu Juneja’s Identity and Femininity in Anita Desai’s Fiction, Journal of South Asian Literature, Summer Fall 1987, Volume 22. No. 2, Essays On Indian Writing In English, pp. 77-86, Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University
Ruth K. Rosenwasser’s Voices of Dissent: Heroines in the Novels of Anita Desai, Journal of South Asian Literature, Summer, Fall 1989, Volume 24, No. 2, pp. 83-116, Asian Studies Center Michigan State University
Elaborate your discussion in depth examining the character of Baba in Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day.
“There was something unsubstantial about his long slimness in the white light cloths, such a ttal absence of being, of character, of clamouring traits and characteristics. He was no more and no less than a white flower or a harmless garden spider.”Schizophrenic, psychotic, autistic, neurotic
and lunatic lamb like cupid of the Das family household. Dualism in the visage of the character Baba justifies Bimla’s resistance to postcolonialism and Tara’s modernistic liberalism recoiling from silences and shadows representative of decadence. A misanthropic that misfits into either
old and cultural paradigms. “Lili Marlene” and “Don’t Fence Me In” are Baba’s passtime gramophone antiques symbolically predilection harboured by the derelict house. Graham Huggan suggests that “silences and music in several postcolonial texts can be seen…as providing that alternative non verbal codes which either subverts and/or replaces the earlier over determined narratives of colonial encounter, in which the word is recognized to have played a crucial role in the production and maintenance of colonial hierarchies of power.”
Fluidity of Baba is neutralized by the brethrenship amongst the companionship of the familial bonds despite that silent shadow dire-like existentialist angst and/or existentialist pangs. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison examines the ways in which Africanism has historically done the work of constructing whiteness in American literature and concludes, “Africanism is the vehicle by the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but freed; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damnable, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.” Toni Morrison furthermore declaims that tentative fluidity and subjective revisionary process engenders echo, shadow, silent force that cannot be articulated but mystified as observable even in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, in corresponding to Baba’s organic disintegration. “The writer’s response to
American Africanism often provides a subtext that either sabotages the surface text’s expressed intentions, or escapes them through a language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate.”
Further Reading
Cindy Lacom’s Revising the Subject: Disability as “Third Dimension” in “Clear Light of Day” and “You Have Come Back”, NWSA Journal, Autumn 2000, Volume 14, No. 3, Feminist Disability Studies [Autumn 2002] pp. 138-154
Write a short note about the personality of Mira Masi in Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day.
Aunt Mira Masi is the widowed alcoholic drunkard ushered by the Das family household to be exclusively caregiving their youngest nervous breakdown and mentally deformed offspring Baba. Being bony and angular, withered and wrinkled; she was soft, scented and sensual like a cracked pot, a torn rag and a picked bone of the Das family household. In linguistic metaphors, Mira Masi is associated with the metonymic allusions to stick or ancient tree. “A drudge in her cell, sealed into a chamber. A grey chamber woven shut. Here she lived, here she crawled from cell to cell, feeding the fat white larvae that … swelled on the nourishment she brought them.” Aunt Mira Masi is discarded as a worthless commodity because her utilitarianism profiteering motif has been diminished and the corporeal viscerality exposed her to be “shabbier”, “skinner” and “seedier”. Desai offers the decadence of biological disintegration as appendages to patriarchy and misogyny and furthermore, emblematically symbolizes surrogacy through the eloquent articulation: “she was the tree that grew at the center of their [childrens’] lives and in whose shade they lived”. “Soon they grew tall, soon they grew strong. They wrapped themselves around her, smothering her in leaves and flowers. She laughed at the profusion that this little grove which was the forest to her, the whole world […] She would just be the old log, the dried mass of roots on which they grew. She was the tree, she was the soil, she was the earth.” Pathos of widowhood and spinsterish virginity have cast a looming dirge-like- sepulchral straitened condition. In lucid language imagist novelist Anita Desai’s stream of consciousness as a narrative technique dexterously recaptures feminine sensibility exhibiting existentialist loneliness and the temperamental distances merits feminine neurosis portrayed by Aunt Mira.
