by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

My first psychoanalyst was an old German woman, who lived in a faded flat overlooking a small lake in Calcutta and who spent our time making me lie on a couch and free-associate. Later, she’d point out things that I seemed to be avoiding – the putative hidden centers around which my thought moved. I was fifteen and alternately charmed and troubled by the inscrutability of this all. Of course I censored myself and said what I thought she wanted to hear. And, of course, it didn’t really do anything to help me, at least not in the short term.

For many years later I’d intermittently free-associate on paper, scrutinizing the traces of the workings of my mind for clues to its substrate. Of course I censored myself and created what I thought I wanted to hear, and of course I was aware of this. I puzzled over how to cut this knot. I think Freud says that psychoanalysis doesn’t begin with free-association; it ends when one is able to free-associate. I’m not sure whether this was supposed to mean a Zen-like state where the productions of the unconscious can flow out unhindered by conscious monitoring, or one where the unconscious has no more conflicts to reveal and so can be purely random.

But to free-associate with yourself is to simultaneously experience the thrill of the detective and that of the criminal, creating the signs of a crime and then trying to decipher them. It is a replay of cops and robbers, even if the roles are often muddled, and, since the act of interpreting the unconscious events often serves to create them, the criminal is sometimes framed.

Read more »

If it were fictional, the Raymond Davis saga would have had a shot for best original screenplay. This one had it all — shootouts, car chases, duplicitous allies and one humdinger of a courtroom climax.

The bare bones of the Davis episode are well known. On January 27, 2011, a man subsequently identifying himself as Raymond Davis shot and killed two men at a busy intersection in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city. After shooting the two men, Davis emerged from his car and filmed their bodies with his cell phone. He then got back into his car and tried to drive away. However, in an unusual display of efficiency, he was chased and arrested by two traffic wardens. A separate vehicle then tried to assist Davis but in the process ran over and killed a motorcyclist.

In his initial interrogation, Davis stated first that he had acted in self-defence and second that he was a contractor employed by the U.S. Consulate in Lahore. The subsequent statement was particularly important because applicable diplomatic conventions distinguish between the limited immunity of consular officials as opposed to the absolute immunity enjoyed by embassy officials on duty. This statement was then corroborated by Assistant Secretary of State Philip J. Crowley who also added the mysterious rider that “reports identifying the employee’s name are false.”

Read more »

Since it first came out in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” has widened the eyes of multiple generations of nerdy kids, and I was certainly no exception. The book draws all sorts of parallels between music, art, math, and computer science, ultimately shaping them into a bold thesis about how consciousness arises from self-reference and recursion. It’s also a very playful book, full of puzzles, puns, and imagined dialogues between Achilles and a tortoise which weave in and out of the main chapters, illustrating the concepts therein.

One of those dialogues, titled “Crab Canon,” seems puzzling when you begin reading it – sprinkled with seeming non-sequitors, the word choice a bit awkward and off-kilter. Then shortly after the halfway point, when you start to see recent lines repeated, in reverse order, you realize: the whole dialogue is a line-level palindrome. The first line is the same as the last, the second line is the same as the second-to-last, and so on. But because Hofstadter chooses his sentences carefully, they often have different meanings when they reoccur in the reverse order. So, for example, the following bit of dialogue in the first half…

Tortoise: Tell me, what's it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?
Achilles: To be precise, one has no frets.
Tortoise: Oh, well, it's all the same to me.
Achilles: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Tortoise: Say, don't you play the guitar?

… becomes this bit of dialogue in the second half:

Achilles: Say, don't you play the guitar?
Tortoise: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Achilles: Oh, well, it's all the same to me.
Tortoise: To be precise, one has no frets.
Achilles: Tell me, what's it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?

Hofstadter does “cheat” a bit, by allowing himself to vary punctuation (for example, “He often plays, the fool” reoccurs later in a new context as “He often plays the fool”). Nevertheless, it’s an impressive execution of a clever conceit.

Read more »

By Aditya Dev Sood

One day the Sultan was looking from a turret window onto the city of Delhi and he no longer liked what he saw. These people were spoiled and unimaginative. Like the residents of every other large and imperial city, they reeked with the parochialism of the metropolis. Even before he became Muhammand bin Tughluq, the Sultan of Hindustan, he had ridden across the burning plateaus of Mahratta, Warangal and Kampili, down deep into Ma’bar, the Tamilian tip of the subcontinent. He knew what they didn’t — the rest of Hindustan lay to the south — all the unconquered petty kingships, all the riches, all the lands yet to be assimilated into his Sultanate. This city of Delhi was just too far north.

With the precise and strategic thinking that had marked all his successful military campaigns, Tughluq began looking for a place that would be more accessible to the furthest reaches of the Sultanate. It had to be equidistant, more or less, from Gujarat and the Sindh, from Delhi and the Gangetic plains, from Bengal, and from the new territories in the South, which he had himself conquered. In this way, he arrived at Devagiri, a small military encampment, from which he planned more efficiently to administer his empire. In 1327, he ordered his subordinate officers of the court, their families and servants, the artisans and traders who supported and served them, to move to Devagiri.

At first, nothing happened. No one would agree to move. He renamed the city Daulatabad, or Money-Ville. He built a wide and safe road to the new city to encourage his courtiers and the rest of the general public of Delhi to relocate. Frustrated in his several inducements, proclamations, commandments, he force-marched the population of Delhi to Daulatabad in 1330. Miserable in their new surroundings, his people were struggling to come to terms to their new conditions when water ran out at the fort. The Sultan himself never remained in Devagiri, being compelled to ride out repeatedly to whichever distant realm of the empire was in crisis or in danger of being lost to local revolt. It was only years later that Tughluq finally relented, allowing those who still survived in Daulatabad to trickle back to Delhi. About this time the Moroccan travel writer Ibn Batutta arrived in the city to record the anger of the surviving local populace of Delhi. What had once been a large and great city, on the order of Cairo or Baghdad, was now empty, abandoned, deserted.

What was Tughluq thinking?

Read more »

by Alyssa Pelish

Robert McKee, in that how-to book called Story that everyone in L.A. quoted to me without citing, says that story is what the world demands of us. I won’t quibble with this. There’s also a popular theory which has it that narrative is really all about desire (to tell one’s story, to find out what happens next, to be heard, etc.). In L.A., as it happens, it was typically in bars and in bed that both McKee’s dictums and people’s screenplay pitches were repeated to me.

Everyone has their theory about stories, about why we tell them. And we do tell them —even though most of the stories we tell on a daily basis are more like the unedited spools of a voice mail message than like the intricate involutions of, say, The Faerie Queene or the latest Terry Gilroy screenplay, or even the simple symmetry of an Aesop’s fable. Most of our stories have no compelling climax, or they fizzle out before they conclude and bore our listeners before they’re over, or they’re needlessly repetitive, or nothing really happens in them. But still we tell them. We’re story-telling animals — homo narratus — is the happy conventional wisdom. It’s how we make sense of stuff. Or pass on information. Or entertain each other. Or learn. Or something. And so it’s there to wonder about, and to explain: why do we tell stories? What evolutionary purpose, what social purpose, what purpose at all does it serve?

This is an incredibly popular question. Game theorists and literary theorists and evolutionary biologists — everybody, at one time or another — have taken a stab at explaining it. When I lived in L.A., people handed McKee’s pronouncements to me. When I was in grad school, I was partial to Peter Brooks’ and Roland Barthes’ ideas on the subject. But I have no novel theory. I’m not here to float a revolutionary explanation for cocktail party anecdotes or campfire tales. The thing is, I’ve become fascinated by the profiles on online dating sites. This is mainly because they’re telling stories for such a transparent purpose. The self-summaries, the self-justifications, the lists of favorite things and unique skills and continents traveled: they all constitute parts of an autobiography composed for public consumption, and they’re all being told, of course, to seduce.

This is one of the sexier ideas of narrative theory — the pairing of narrative and desire. So it’s somewhat gratifying to see it played out so unequivocally, and on such a large scale, in a non-academic, even non-literary, setting. There is never any question about the role desire plays in these profiles. Even if you consider the most guileless among them, every single profile is written out of desire. And not just the sort of desire in the abstract that’s so often used as a titillating metaphor in literary studies; people write these profiles because they’re looking for, at the very least, a date — and at most, a mate.

Read more »

By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

1. MEN RAPE FROM LUST NOT RAGE

Let me start with a facetious declaration: the only reason I'm not a potential rapist is that I'm 5' 5″ and weigh a 125 pounds. Unless I go on a two-year weight-training regimen, most women would be able to fight me off successfully.

Which brings me to the point of why men rape. It's because they can. Men have physical power over women. They're bigger and stronger than their victims, so they rape them. Being pragmatic, men have availed themselves of this advantage since the dawn of man.

In fact, rape is as natural to mankind as nesting is to womankind. We may frown upon it now — thank heavens — but a few hundred years ago men were raping and pillaging like locusts tearing up a cornfield, which afforded them a pleasant diversion from burning women as witches or killing them not-so-softly via childbirth. Back then, men had absolute power over women; accordingly, so did their penises.

Did that mean they had anger issues with women? I don't think so. They just did what came naturally. In fact, I don't buy into the notion that men rape because they hate women. I think most rapists rape because they lust, not because they're mad at women. Of course there are some serial offenders who are psychopaths, with the empathy section of their brain MIA. But I believe rape is a different story for most Ivy League students who date-rape co-eds, or for army guys who rape fellow soldiers, or for Peace Corp volunteers who rape fellow volunteers. We're talking about thousands of nice, well-brought-up lads, who will go on to marry and have children, if they haven't done so already. I don't think they rape because they hate women, as comforting a notion as that may be to the ears of pop-psychology feminists. I think these men rape because they want a particular woman and have few qualms about forcing themselves upon that woman; they know they can get away with it. Their physical power makes them feel entitled to having their way with their lust object. Heck, they probably think they're doing their victims a favor by throwing them a boner. It's not hate or anger that makes them do it — they just want to screw a particular female. Some of these errant bastards will do it again. Some might even make a habit of it.

2. BHL AND DSK

A prick like Dominique Strauss-Kahn has most probably been leaping on French chambermaids all his life, and gotten away with it. The mistake he made was to try and rape an African immigrant in New York, a ballsy woman who was strong enough to fight back, and who let him stick his manhood in her mouth twice after he slapped her around a bit, but in the end she escaped.

Read more »

Pacquiao has achieved what most Philippine leaders have not—stop crime. For the duration of the Pacquiao fever at least. The widely shared sentiment is more than a joke. Every time Pacquiao goes to the boxing ring, everyone stays in their homes, glued to the television sets. Strangers in bars watching television become instant friends, hollering in unison for their hero.

Pacquiao seems to be all about winning. He has won in eight weight divisions, gathering ten world boxing titles, a feat matched by no other. In 2009, he was included in Time’s 2009 Most Influential People. He has recorded an album and starred in several box office movies. He has become a commercial model for all sorts of products—liquor, gadgets, shoes, milk. Politicians have tried to attach their names to his, hoping perhaps his charisma, his fame would rub off. His wife and mother have gone from being ordinary citizens to icons constantly seen on feature shows, their opinions sought after on issues of marriage, lifestlyle, fashion. He ran for a congressional seat, representing South Cotabato in 2007 and lost. When he ran again in 2011, this time representing Saranggani, he won.

All throughout his campaign he has identified poverty as his main focus. It would be the greatest fight of his life. The Philippines is a Third World Country, and most candidates identify poverty as the focus of their campaigns, but somehow with Pacquiao, there seemed to be a genuineness attached to it. This was after all, a man who was once poor, who did his best to make something better of himself. He was everyone’s hero. His media portrayal also didn’t hurt—his album was dedicated to the country; its lead single ‘Para Saiyo (roughly translated in English as ‘For You’) basically told of how he was talking the blows of his opponents as a sacrifice to his country. During his post-win interviews, he would often reiterate the sentiment, that he was glad to have been of service to his fellowmen—an act sometimes read as arrogance, a sense of bloated self importance.

Despite qualms of his inexperience in politics, Pacquiao has gotten the nods of environmentalists and NGOs when he took a stand to investigate illegal mining in Sarangani. Feared to be one of those lawmakers who would avoid discussions because of lack of knowledge, Pacquiao has proved critics wrong, speaking up in his much-derided English on bills, expressing his arguments the way he expressed himself before international media, with confidence and not a hint of shyness. That alone must have gathered enough respect for the boxer-turned-politician.

Read more »