Author: Rijul Ballal

There’s poetry in every cloud and a story behind every leaf that flutters down. We’re all nomads under the eternal blue sky. Check out my work on rijul ballal.wordpress.com, like, comment and subscribe :)

Butter

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What if you spent hours on a dish that tasted really bad?

It’s easy to understand why Asako Yuzuki’s novel has gotten so popular. She’s a deeply introspective author who has got a great ear for all those thoughts about food and the body, that we have all had but have never said out loud. Ever so often I found myself forced to put the book down and spend a little time thinking about what she’d just said. A lot of food for thought if you will.

Unfortunately she’s got a great ear but terrible taste! Early on I knew I was in trouble because none of the food she was talking about sounded like they tasted any good. Being from a land of spices I found myself baffled by how anyone could be so moved by the bland and elaborate concoctions that Yuzuki mercilessly elaborates on. You must really be deprived if butter is driving you nuts. Imagine if she found out about Ghee?

This isn’t a bad book but a frustrating one. The first few chapter have so much promise, using a well tested recipe. It uses the conceit of a detective novel. Rika could be the inquisitive but hapless Watson and her friend Rieko- Holmes. It should be a piece of cake – which is used perfectly when the story begins – but the author throws this out the window.

The tasteless substitute is agonising detail about every bland French Dish and stray thought the protagonist has about her rather ordinary life. It’s worth talking about but you are supposed to blend that it in with the spicy murder mystery that people came for in the first place! Maybe her editor fell asleep but did we really need to have so much of the protagonist’s tedious inner monologue?

This reminded me of Sacred Games in how the author gets so caught up in their navel gazing  that they forget they are writing a crime thriller. Other authors have attempted the same feat and understood that you need some sort of action or movement to keep your readers sated. Haibane Renmi for example has even less action baked into its premise yet is still a perfectly cooked encapsulation of self acceptance and friendship.

I don’t even mind the fact that so much of the text is descriptive, Alan Moore’s Promethia is proof enough that you can dump the old adage about Showing and not Telling if you are creative enough. Yuzuki is not that creative and decides to imitate the myriad food blogs that litter the internet mixing unprompted personal tales between their undercooked recipes. So much time is wasted listing every possible question or thought about something that has just happened. Why explain so much about someone staring at any oven and not the murderer who actually did the interesting stuff? Surely that was the bigger fish to fry?

A friend of mine complained that so much tension was built up between Rika and Rekio which was left completely unused. The same can be said about so much of the story and about nearly every character’s relationship with each other. Yuzuki has a keen eye that is able to pick up on how people relate to and hide from each other. She describes them in the most interesting ways but so many friendships that are thrown in are an afterthought.

The central murder mystery clearly needed more time in the oven. It goes nowhere. Why write a story about a journalist who’s bad at their job? Why not offer something spicy instead of long insights into the world’s most suggestible woman who may write the most boring opinion column in history? Nothing that this novel wants to explore is alien to me. None of the uncomfortable notions about the body and society are off-putting to me. I had an appetite for what the cook promised. Even the villain built from the authors own fears and complexes so boldly presented seemed tantalising.

So many good ingredients but the dish just doesn’t come together. Every metaphor she uses, like little Balaji, is tortured like a boiled lobster. You could cut about two hundred pages from this book and it would be better for it. The happy ending and the friendships that are supposed to differentiate the protagonist from the antagonist are half baked. Kanjii basically disappears from the novel taking with her anything interesting about this story with her. You should not write a detective novel and tell the reader you don’t know how the murders happened – it’s like a joke with no punchline.

Most importantly none of the food that the characters bloviate about sound good! Why would I want to listen to how you roast a bland bird? It reminded me of how Murakami looks at American Cultural detritus and presents them with wonder. It sucks. It sounds awful and I’m sure it tastes bad. If someone made this poor woman taste Indian food she’d experience Jouissance before exploding.

The strange case of Billy Biswas

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This novel clings to me like a ghost, pulling me into a past I’ve never lived in but descended from.


The story threatened to be the usual fare, some bored City dweller runs to the hills, running into the arms of some novel savage with a heart of gold in a cliché so played out that only smutty novels can still tell such a story without embarrassment.


Our narrator Romi and his friend Billy are much like your middle class strivers today except of a higher caliber. You see this story is set in the fifties, right after the British Raj when the middle classes weren’t quite as pathetic as they are today. These were August men of learning who rather than visiting foreign shores in meek desperation came with a confidence that only generational privilege can endow you with.


They study abroad and are effortlessly back in power once they’re in India. Romi the narrator in perticular is so insulated in his position as an IAS officer that he rides his horse and lords around like a princiling. You might imagine the privileges that white colonial officers enjoyed took a little while to leave the upper echelons of the “service”.


His friend, Billy, by contrast has a gnawing awareness that ruins him. If any of you know members of this dying class, as I do through my grandfather, you’ll know that an extraordinary casualness defines a great deal of who they are. Great tragedy is often met by wit rather than any feeling.


Billy in choosing to study anthropology, in choosing to cohort with tribal folk loses all connections to his social class. You could read this novel as a curious look into a mad man or maybe a retelling of that long Indian tradition of leaving the material world to mediate towards enlightenment. The truth only emerges if you understand how the upper classes are at war with their own minds.


There are parts of this novel that hint at magic, at this great primitive truth lying right beyond civilisation. I found this the least interesting of all. Those of you who’ve actually crossed that line will learn that there is no other. There is no sacred knowledge that the poor or remote tribes possess, if anything you’ll find the agony of realising that you’re all the same, that even in the remotest corners the same benign inconveniences of the modern world flourish.


For Billy however these poor tribes folk represent something truly alien to the bourgeois, the psychological wonder of just being normal. You see the great traditions of the aristocracy will imbibe you with knowledge, discipline and character but still dam you. It is impossible to truly be rich in that way, in a system built on exploitation and also be well adjusted.


The previous owner of the book I was reading had foolishly scribbled that Billy should have practiced detachment in his life. Nonsense! Middle class nonsense! The upper crust of society is all about detachment. Honour and integrity have you chained to conventional society but rich families are perverse imitation of belonging.


Billy, realising his family doesn’t love him, runs to the forest like many sages before him but here he also runs into the arms of another woman. He begs his wife and family to listen to him but they can’t do it. Their world of high society is all about image and propriety. He is greedy and selfish, abandoning his family as many of our sages probably did. Most importantly he doesn’t stop lusting or conquer his desires -much harder to sanitise a man like that isn’t it? Yet this is probably an instinct that many noble enlightenment seekers also felt.

In the end Billy is welcomed into the tribe as a priest but I think that’s a rather pathetic end. Here’s a man from a class of society so alienating that you’ve got to run into the arms the very poor you exploit to feel anything. Billy talks about magic and the ways of the forest but would have probably have been just as happy if his wife actually bothered to talk to him or appreciated his job.

By the time Romi discovers Billy has run away from home and family, Romi is brutally crushing a tribal uprising caused by a drought. Romi hardly seems to dwell on the bloodshed or the fact that he could stop it, only lamenting the bad taste it leaves him with.
In the end Romi also dams the sad happiness Billy has carved out for himself. Despite being in charge of the entire district he is just another cog in the machine that kills Billy, probably the only person he loves. This is why that old ruling class was doomed, ultimately it created great and learned men who could not act out of love or even learn to get along with their families.

It’s a tempting and easy thing to dream of the great outdoors, a rural reprieve free of the corruptions capitalism, urbanism or modernity has wrought. Yet again those with their eyes open will know that no such sanctuary exists. If anything those are the breeding grounds for the most savagely casteist and capitalist classes out there.

It is the collective that is civilising, it is in the congregation of the poor, desperate in their solidarity that liberates. Whatever Moksha you can find in the mountains is a selfish one and as this story goes, just a sad refuge for those too broken to reach the people around them.

Big Sleepy Red Harvest

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Having read Dashiell Hammett’s ‘Red Harvest’ right after Raymond Chandler’s ‘The big sleep’ I constantly broke my immersion on many occasions to compare the two. There was something about Red Harvest that didn’t sit right with me.

On paper I should have enjoyed this novel more. It had a lot more to say about politics and crimes long reach into the halls of power. Yet I grew wary of the sort of pleasure a novel like this brings. Not that it is anything other than a great, fun novel but there’s so much here that fundamentally influences the make up of an American myth.

A lowly grunt with his own brand of justice and work ethic, swoops down on a backwater and saves the day. Think of Client Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’, Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard’, John Grisham’s novel ‘the Last Juror’ or of any number of policemen on TV shows. It’s an “everyman” -often with a badge- navigating the seedy underbelly of America with cynicism and grit defining them. They’ve all got drinking problems, they’re usually single with a long list of put downs to hurl at salacious women who throw themselves at out heroes. They occasionally get beaten up but are always hyper competent.

While Red Harvest is a great read it’s also a distilled essence of an entire genre. Chandler’s novel by contrast seems to offer a more believable detective in Marlowe. He’s not just floating across the world in someways immune to it or above it. By the end Marlowe hasn’t cleaned up town, his enemies aren’t scattered to the wind or even pure evil and he’s clearly affected by the whole process. The story seems to be driven not by one scheme running across another but by more human urges and mistakes.

When I finished ‘Red Harvest’ I realised I had stumbled onto the final word on this entire genre. Not in the difference between the two novels but in how ‘the Shield’  adapts it to TV. ‘the Shield’ isn’t quite prestige drama though it owes its existence to it. It is “copaganda” so to speak much like the endless pro-police tv shows that American media creates but also highlights the truth of a slogan like “ACAB” in every episode. It has all the genre tropes, stereotypes, plot points and delusions you can trace all the way back to a Holmes novel or just to a season of CSI.

Yet what drives the Shield, never curious about the socio-political context like ‘the Wire’ is just the gradual truth about a character like the one in these detective novels. A hyper competent man with his own brand of justice who goes against the law with his loyal minions isn’t saving the world. Sooner or later he gets greedy because it’s easy. The law isn’t out to get him, it saves him and launders his sins – it thrives when it creates such men. He isn’t looking out for the corrupt world and fallen people around him, no he looks down on them and exploits them, his stoic world view hiding a desperate needs to dominate and be admired by his victims and his tribe.

In the Shield detective Vic Mackey is corrupt, corrupts his friends, destroys lives, commits crimes, swears oaths about honour and loyalty and ultimately betrays all his friends and oaths leading his sworn brothers to their deaths or arrests all the while saving his own skin – the only real skills the this genre pushes forwards. Self preservation  and honour in Ronin doesn’t seem too different from the virtues of Bandits. Yet he is interchangeable with any of the protagonists in these detective novels, we just see where this kind of story ends.

Dog Dreams

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I dream of my old dog, Mickey, a tiny mutt smarter than any dog I’ve ever seen, untrained but more disciplined than we deserved. She would run after my cousins and I, while we played with toy guns, with a broken toy gun in her mouth.

She was one of us she must have thought, even though she was so pregnant that her tiny frame could no longer handle stairs. Her only daughter that stayed with us was Honey, who looked suspiciously like a diminutive sheep dog. She was not as smart as her mother but had no malice in her, though we would later learn, she was a fearsome hunter.

When my parents separated we took them to my ancestral home. They were as much adrift as me, city dogs in a wild and winding farm. They seemed to take to it far better than me. Honey in particular took to hunting mouse deer and her daughters would continue that tradition long after she died. I thought of the two white dogs, we left behind, the two white dogs that had died before them. One of them, Sunny, was about as smart as Mickey and knew his reflection, he even tried to use the washroom much to the horror of my aunt. They told me my father killed him, accidentally, but they didn’t seem confident about that part. He’s probably among my oldest memories.

My grandparents had their own exotic white, curly haired dogs, until their declining fortunes left them with a cowardly brown Indie, with a black scar running down from his forehead to his eyes, like someone tried to split his head open. My mother and grandmother would mock him relentlessly but my grandfather would describe a fierce and intelligent dog who was traumatised by a monkey attack. Later he changed the story to wicked farm labourers playing the culprits. Duma, as we called him, never left the small courtyard, he was terrified of something beyond it. We were so alike, except he spent more time outside than I did.

I moved back to the city and the dogs grew more distant, far away in the farm. We got a series of cats, the dogs stayed on the borders of my memories. When Mickey died after a cobra got her I didn’t feel much. Honey died and I can’t remember why. Her daughters lived on, in the farm, hunting small game as my grandparents grew less involved in the farm and stayed more in the city. They grew wilder and at least two of them had the same name. The last one might have had another owner and disappeared into the distance of the village. Maybe that bloodline ended there, somewhere in the dark of night where feral dogs go hunting.

My grandfather once told me about a Pomeranian he had, until a leopard took it away into the jungles that used to be there. I heard that as the most profound thing he could ever say about a world he lived in, that went away. There are no leopards or jungles now much less leopards haunting farms. I think of the dogs I see in my dreams and wonder what I’ve lost, my childhood or with the last of Honey’s granddaughters, my family.

Blackberry 2023, a review

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I watched this movie called Blackberry. It aspires to be more intelligent than it’s trope ridden peers that present corporate machinations as heroic struggles. As far as I know, we’ve had movies about Cheetos and a line of Nike shoes this year.
Would it surprise you to learn that the Nike movie makes little mention of the slave trade and sweat shops it uses to make its shoes? Or that the movie never stops to consider that it’s mythologising a few industrial parasites that make disposable, unremarkable shoes that clutter landfills in the third world? Of course not!
The Blackberry movie avoids this dull idolising of fads by imbibing a certain amount of cynicism. It’s clear that these aren’t exceptional people, just ruthless cutthroats around at the right time. Indeed the fall of Blackberry is attributed to a Co-CEO being more interested in Hockey and a dim witted attempt at becoming a sports magnate than his cash cow.
However there’s a theme throughout the movie that presents using Chinese manufacturing as an act of selling out. It also presents it’s leads, as principled in their provincial Canandianness. 
At best this is a lazy trope, at worst this is the movie grasping at a greater political consciousness.
It doesn’t work because the recurring theme of the poor quality of Chinese manufacturing has little to do with the quality of Chinamen. It is simple because ruthless elites, like the ones the movie follows, just cared about the bottom line and did not care if the what was delivered was faulty. Indeed more blame should go to these top men than to the manufacturing. A rather important point the movie fails to make.
If I were to also try reaching a greater political consciousness, I would say the movie does not make this point in a clear way because that would mean reckoning with the fundamental nature of both industry and industrialists in the Anglosphere. Apple, the usurper in this tale, has always delivered a quality (if restrictive) user experience and manufacturing deeply in the embrace of the Chinese mainland. So irreplaceable is the quality of Chinese industry that Apple’s attempt to shift away from the mainland has long been floundering despite many would be oracles predicting its imminent transportation to other less threatening eastern powers.
While Anglo-Oligarchs launder and obscure their dependance and lost ground even when it comes to high end manufacturing to the mainland, the rhetoric of  the Anglosphere is what I’m taking issue with. In the Neo-liberal order, the furtherest left a mainstream politician and artist can go is to spout trope after trope about the outsourcing of jobs without a care to blame the people who outsourced the jobs. It is so easy to find menacing perils to the South and East but the Oligarchs receive only the phantom of blame. So much for the long championed western republican tradition! It has fallen into secrecy and denial when it comes to the most powerful, lacking even the strength to notice its impotence.
The dramatic stakes in the story are a result of personal follies but more importantly from a system on the brink. One gamble after an another is the only thing that offers momentum and success to anyone on screen. If they ever stopped for honesty or principle they would fail immediately. Even climbing the top is no guarantee of security. Without the colonies, cheap labour and a declining rate of profit it seems like the western finance capital has just gamblers betting till their luck runs out. It’s the fag end of the neo-liberal promise, so why agonise about China? They’re the only ones keeping the system running.

Here comes the night

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I mourn the fireflies

There used to be so many

My grandparents say

They would looks at the trees at night

Seeing more firefly lights than stars in the sky

“There” they point, at the ancient mango tree

“It pulsed with light, like a forest breathing”

I found one in my room

I took him outside

He lit up and flew, disoriented

Not another firefly in sight

And Quietly flows the Don : A Review

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I made my foray into Russian novels with Sholokhov’s “And quietly flows the Don”, far from the usual settings of Imperial Russia and a little too close to the modern world. I grimaced in anticipation of my mind sifting through every word and implication for political agreement as anyone who’s politics has been shaped by too much time online is wont to do.

Yet even the most irritating of internet tendencies stood no chance against Sholokhov’s masterful writing. It’s no surprise he was awarded a Nobel prize, awards like those need to affix themselves to worthwhile writers so that the other slop they push has some credibility.

Sholokhov takes an impressive approach to the Russian revolution where the vast plains of the steppe and the Don river flow with as much beauty and significance as the world changing events transpiring around them. In fact the beauty with which Sholokhov describes his homeland makes you wonder if he cares for the landscape more than the characters.

This is not to say the characters aren’t up to snuff, in typical Russian fashion we get a lengthy genealogy of a long and growing list of characters who are never anxious to present themselves till the war itself is ready to receive them. There is a certain resignation to the many trials and torments the characters suffer, a kind of apolitical eye examining the ups and downs of the war, never judging anyone for the shifting alliance and swaying tides of the war. Given that this was written after the war and by a communist, this is an intensely “realist” approach that gives the characters a great deal of room to change their minds and struggle against the tide of history.

In the hands of a lesser writer this searing focus on big men from small villages, the tragedy conveyed by their ignominious deaths in the Great War, the Civil War, German occupation and their obliviousness to what comes next might seem bitter. Yet in the able hands of Sholokhov, it is rather matter of fact, beautify but embodying a kind of indifferent and constant push onward much like a quiet river.

Be like water

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WordPress asks me what new skills I learnt recently as the text cursor waits for me expectantly. Well I learnt nothing and why it’s important. For a long time now I’ve been scouring various theogonies and mythologies from the Mediterranean to the Steppe. Nothing seemed to resonate till I returned to the one tradition that provoke the most resistance in me, Daoism. Of course the inscrutable I Ching was the least comforting guide in an urgent but dreadfully prolonged search for meaning. Yet the Tao says that a vessel is only useful because of the emptiness inside. Somehow I am a broken bell that now rings and I have been having the most pleasant dreams of the last few years. I’ve been mixing a little bit of Jung’s active imagination to the mix and yesterday I saw a forest in the fall, leaves brown and sweeping downwards, the forest floor aching for someone to trod on the leaves that yearn to crack and offer music to the scene. Nature is indeed a teacher as the Tao says, but I also saw a guide in black robes, face obscured with a dry leaf, beacon me closer into the dark of the dry forest – as though the season and the empty world beneath the canopies yearned to be filled by my curiosity. Nature is indeed a teacher and my master wields a leaf.