Farewell

Three years passed off like a blur. It was quite a learning experience. Knowing and experiencing different people, different courses etc.

'Comparative Literature'- huh what was that again?
Comparative Literature- Wow

The transition of the personal and the academic journey has been epic at least on a personal level. Our batch has truly been a 'golden batch' (not just in lieu of us entering in the 50th year of the department) There were questions asked and answered. There were debates and there was a rustic honesty (obviously i am being general here) I am really glad that i began my higher education in this department and i can call myself a 'product' (I know product would be a crude commodification of self but i can't think of anything better) of this department.

Today as i move on, just a corridor away to the Department of English for my post graduate studies, i realize i will be leaving a lot behind. Those familiar classes, teachers, sounds, friends and texts. This year i guess a large number of my classmates will be moving out which is kind of sad. However for all those staying behind and the newbies joining (who might just by some strange twist of fate glance upon this blog) This department is great not just for being radical but for being different and composed of some of the friendliest teachers you will see after your 12 years in school.


P.S: I am leaving the blog and passing its ownership on to Khyati. Khyati, you can now invite others to contribute to this blog as well. This blog has ALL the pictures of the CLAI conference and deleting the blog would have meant deleting those preserved memories.

P.P.S: Maybe other CL students staying on or moving out could recount their three years of experience here? Maybe the blog can be of some purpose after all these three years atleast. :-P

x

Announcement

Hey people, i was thinking if we could use this space as a form of dissemination of knowledge you know. I was thinking maybe we could put up our term papers and critical essays so that others might be benefited from them.

This will be an experimental venture. Lets give it a shot and see what happens?
Also in bid to majorly upgrade this place, I am requesting all students of CL who blog to kindly give me their gmail id's so that u might be added as contributors


Thanks

Rohit
(administrator)
UG-3

Varsaad Bhinjve

"Varsaad Bhinjve" is a poem by Gujarati Poet-Ramesh Parekh.The title means 'Baarish Bhigoye' aur 'Rain Drenches'...........basically its about Rain......I havent managed to translate and transliterate the whole poem....the lines that I have translated and transliterate are my favourite lines of the poem.Some of the Hindi spellings mite be flawed.


"અહીં આપણે બે અને વરસાદ ભીંજવે
મને ભીંજવે તું તને વરસાદ ભીંજવે"

"ahi aapne be ane varsaad bhinjve
mane bhinjve tu tane varsaad bhinjve"

" यहाँ हम दो और बारिश भिगोये
मुझे भिगोये तु और तुझे बारिश भिगोये "

"yahan hum do aur baarish bhigoye
mujhe bhigoye tu tujhe baarish bhigoye"

Wild'e' poems

MADONNA MIA

A LILY-GIRL, not made for this world's pain,
With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears,
And longing eyes half veiled by slumberous tears
Like bluest water seen through mists of rain:
Pale cheeks whereon no love hath left its stain,
Red underlip drawn in for fear of love,
And white throat, whiter than the silvered dove,
Through whose wan marble creeps one purple vein.
Yet, though my lips shall praise her without cease,
Even to kiss her feet I am not bold,
Being o'ershadowed by the wings of awe,
Like Dante, when he stood with Beatrice
Beneath the flaming Lion's breast, and saw
The seventh Crystal, and the Stair of Gold

Oscar Wilde

'Madonna Mia' was originally published in Kottabos (1877) under the title Wasted Days. It was entirely rewritten for Poems (1881).

BY THE ARNO

The oleander on the wall
Grows crimson in the dawning light,
Though the grey shadows of the night
Lie yet on Florence like a pall.

The dew is bright upon the hill,
And bright the blossoms overhead,
But ah! the grasshoppers have fled,
The little Attic song is still.

Only the leaves are gently stirred
By the soft breathing of the gale,
And in the almond-scented vale
The lonely nightingale is heard.

The day will make thee silent soon,
O nightingale sing on for love!
While yet upon the shadowy grove
Splinter the arrows of the moon.

Before across the silent lawn
In sea-green vest the morning steals,
And to love's frightened eyes reveals
The long white fingers of the dawn.

Fast climbing up the eastern sky
To grasp and slay the shuddering night,
All careless of my heart's delight,
Or if the nightingale should die

Oscar Wilde

'By the Arno' was originally published in the Dublin University Magazine, 1876

LA BELLA DONNA DELLA MIA MENTE (Lovely Lady of My Memory).

My limbs are wasted with a flame,
My feet are sore with travelling,
For, calling on my Lady's name,
My lips have now forgot to sing.

O Linnet in the wild-rose brake
Strain for my Love thy melody,
O Lark sing louder for love's sake,
My gentle Lady passeth by.

She is too fair for any man
To see or hold his heart's delight,
Fairer than Queen or courtesan
Or moonlit water in the night.

Her hair is bound with myrtle leaves,
(Green leaves upon her golden hair!)
Green grasses through the yellow sheaves
Of autumn corn are not more fair.

Her little lips, more made to kiss
Than to cry bitterly for pain,
Are tremulous as brook-water is,
Or roses after evening rain.

Her neck is like white melilote
Flushing for pleasure of the sun,
The throbbing of the linnet's throat
Is not so sweet to look upon.

As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded, is her crimson mouth,
Her cheeks are as the fading stain
Where the peach reddens to the south.

O twining hands! O delicate
White body made for love and pain!
O House of love! O desolate
Pale flower beaten by the rain!

--
Oscar Wilde
'La Bella Donna Della Mia Mente' was originally published in Kottabos, 1876. It was revised for Poems, 1881.

Last watlz....

It was one of those lazy afternoons on the ledge. Utterly bored we decided to write a poem composing one line each at a time......

Here's what we came up with.....



Last Waltz



Waltzing to the pagan songs

her eyes streaming pearls

cascading the torrential crimson flows

haze of kohl and drooping curls

the smell of midnight, trickling sweet

Her back aches, her muscles crack

Orgasmic laughter, the pain so sweet

The endless moment intense

Mnemnosyne come to my aid

Oblivion's curse rattles the

Chain!

by-
Anahata and Astraeus
U.G-2 Comparative Literature
02/08/2007
4:45 pm

lazarillo de tormes

stray thoughts

yes.. now we are 2nd years. The newbies have been selected and in less than a week's time Ju will be filled with hordes of new faces. A few old ones will surely be missed... and ofcourse the bastion of seniority has been passed on to us. Orgasmic thrusts of elation fills our mind and shots of verbal consolences fill my mind. The semester has not been good at all and i can chart my downfall in the next few semesters to come if i dont start rolling up my socks right away.

Wilde and Rushdie now seems to be playing mind games and their works start to seem oh so enticing compared to Machiavelli's ecclesiastical Prince which is quite frankly a drab and a bore.

Ican chart the course of my spilled dreams and if within the next few days i cannot garner enough excitement for my academic texts i would be looking at an academic suicide.

Mnemosyne... come to my aid.

RESULTS!!!

2nd semester results of UG1 are rumoured to be getting out on Monday the 2nd of July ..it seems i am heading for a nervous break down...this always happens...this fear gripping me in its deathly grasp...the tension mounting....o my god!how will i fare...what if i flunk??preparations were good...but i am unsure of how i have performed....i need a 60% to save face....i just hope i get what i deserve...and that my hard work pays off....help!!!i am scared.....

random

yay!the semester is finally over.....we are officially second years now....soon the freshers will troop in..and my my arn't we glad to be the seniors!i am just itching to plan some really naughty "interactive session"[namely ragging]any suggestion is always welcome but then our seniors weren't all that bad to us so maybe we ll just be nice and friendly to them...for the time being all i am bothered is to have some unadulterated fun!

THE APRIL LIST 2007

STATUTORY WARNING!!!!!!!

This poem is not meant for people with a serious bent of mind. If this hurts anybody’s sentiments: YOU DON’T KNOW US..WE DON’T KNOW YOU.

Do not blame us for our AUDACITY cos this is the COMPARATIVE LITERATURE DEPARTMENTAL TRADITION!!!!!

HARK!!! Here comes the UG-1 with their APRIL LIST.

The UG-1 make their grand entry,

Seeing them tremble the sentry,

The mobile phone rings,

And the professors in the HOD’s office shriek,

Look out,here come the

UG-1 on fortune’s wings.

Flamboyant,trendy and uber cool,

Look how they make their profs drool

Missing classes and upto tricks,

And then there is Varun,

Our very own Jimmy Hendrix.

Always upto mischief and unlimited fun

But when it comes to marks ,they are bang on!!!

So intimidated are we by S.M

That we dare not cause mayhem.

Call him when he is teaching something new

His sonorous voice greets you,

“SORRY, I AM IN A CLASS,I CANT TAKE YOUR CALL.”

Introducing us to the Sapphic world bold

S.C ma’am as sweet as saccharine sold.

“NEXT THING I AM GOING TO TEACH

IS LESABIANS AND GAYS,

HIDE UNDER THE BED IF YOU MAY.”

S.D.G,the dentist’s delight,

Is the coolest professor we can sight.

His t-shirts are one of it’s kinds,

Elephant butts and beer bottles

That no one would mind.

Exuding sharpness that is so ICy,

Makes the drab Rostam & Sohrab sound so spICy.

Quick on the uptake,with nothing missing her I(eye),

She is always on a all time high.

Months turn into a year

And it’s time for the new first years to appear

Look out for we proclaim

We are what we are and we’ll never change

So be ware and sit tight

Cos it will be yet another bumpy ride.

We might become the new UG-2

But wait, we are not done yet

We are and we will remain the ECCENTRIC FEW!!!!

-The UG-1

2006-2007

N.B we are still wondering why this called the APRIL LIST…and why the month of APRIL has been chosen for such a list!!!

Semester flashback 2

Hurray! This semester has officially come to an end. Its flashback time. Unlike last semester when I was literally moved to tears just thinking that we won’t have the same professors but this semester, its relief. It’s been a terrible 4 months. Studies were tougher than ever. Honestly I didn’t know what I was studying for…I answered randomly without knowing what I was writing was what was asked in the question! Somehow I have managed to scrape through….slogging never seemed to come to an end. Texts were too tough to comprehend….but I am glad somehow I have managed to hang on and not given up into despair!

I was very apprehensive to go back to college after the last semester…I was shattered and I dint want to face people…things weren’t right first week…but then slowly things fell into place…..I have evolved as a person…I did a lot of growing up to do…I finally broke the ice between a “Senior” and me. and after that I found a wonderful friend in her…so much for prejudices!

CLAI…brought with it loads of fun and enjoyment….it brought all of us close as a unit….we used to be in college from early morning till late into the night…it seemed that our department was having their own little marriage ceremony…everyone was busy. there was an excitement in the air….on the first day of CLAI our semester results came out…what an excitement! Thankfully I did well….managed to get a first class….Rohit made me proud... He topped our class…and someone else didn’t…the dinners and lunches sitting around chatting is something I’ll never forget, sharing this kind of time with friends hadn’t been possible before….

Salsa was born in the month of February and what a celebration it was….the several meeting with her…and finally holding her and cooing to her was something that brought back memories of my niece……

The study session in my house…the Herculean effort to study and understand “French hour” …..lazing around and finally getting back to studies…initially it looked more like a party than study session but then so many of us huddled together, cracking jokes and playing pranks while studying was fun!

Sanskriti! This was our first year to witness Ju fest! I must admit it turned out really well…being a part and attending to the so called “sanskriti committee” and knowing that sanskriti may not happen…budget crisis! No sponsors! All was a mess. More so political undertones… then a total detachment from everything. Sanskriti brought with it more bonding , more fun and more ways to be together and celebrate

What will always be memorable is the BBC sessions, after a grueling week…slumping down on the ground and just relaxing with friends… chatting, laughing singing songs and teasing each other and then drowning in the retrospection of life…and where it will lead us to…

Abhinandans house party….10 of us huddled in a small ac room…laughing away to glory! having fun like there is no tomorrow….coffee making sessions…and ultimately boozing and then getting drunk [not me, my friends]

Then came Elections! Rohit and Soura won the CR seats as against someone…and ah! Aren’t I happy! FAS won all over….and what a celebration it was! Moreover our friend Soura was the CR as well as AGS…it was a double celebration!

This semester Nimisha, Khyati Rohit and I we joined Italian classes….the first few words in Italian michiamo raka, come stai? bene grazie e tu?...it was whole lot fun…finding excuses not to attend classes…hogging sessions after the class…those chats near the gate…all will be memorable to me…..its been a joy ride learning Italian.

This semester we managed to shoo RC away for good. Subha di went away to JNU and Swapan babu was no longer our professor! But he came in for 4 days and took our classes to fill in for the other professors…though the study session was hectic [1 ½ hours in a row]…I realized that it was fun. and there is another side to him than what meets the eye….

Last two weeks were extremely exhausting! what with internals almost everyday…classes and then again extra classes and what with the strike and the DL being closed more problems…and now that finally the classes are over. no more internals and no more going to college…I am too fatigued to even feel bad that finally the sem is over…I know something…I am going to miss Debasree di a lot…somehow I haven taken a liking to her…and I ll miss having her around…

In two weeks the semester is coming up…I’ll take a break of 2-3 days, unwind and then again get back into studies….this semester is tough…so extra slogging is required….hopefully this time I study hard enough to maintain my first division. It seems just yesterday that we entered JU and in a blink of an eye a whole year went by…soon the new 1st years will troop in and we’ll be seniors! Yay! 2nd semester is finally over……….

NEW website

hear ye hear ye hear ye
All comparatists!!
Jadavpur University, Department of Comparative Literature has a new website

The Website

An introduction to Comparative Literature

Buddhadeva Bose (1908-74.) has been called the most multifaceted genius among the modern poets in Bengal. For those who are unfamiliar with Bengali literary history, this translates into the post-Rabindranath Tagore generation of poets who tried at once to move out of Rabindranath’s long shadow and establish an intellectual connection with Modernisms as they arose in western literatures, even while attempting to define themselves as Indian in a newly independent nation-state. These were the concerns that framed Bose’s founding of the first (and till date, the only) full-fledged department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in Bengal in 1956. The defining characteristics of the Comparative literature Movement in India owed much to these foundational impulses. His engagement with "tradition" whether in the form of the immediate past (Rabindranath) or the more ancient treasures identified as "Indian" literature, an engagement with the "other", whether it was the remote and alternative other in the form of continental Europe and America, or the other as the English colonial master, more immediate and overwhelming, formed the dialectics that informed the need for a methodology of literary study that went beyond the boundaries of compartmentalized single literatures. Comparative Literature in India bears the traces of Bose’s intricately historicised ,discerning and deeply felt analysis of western Modernism (witness his introduction to his translation of Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire O Taar Kobita 1961) his own careful delineation of the "modern" in Bangla literature (intro, Adhunik Bangla Kobita, 1954). Introduction to 'Kalidaser Meghaduta' called "Samskrta Kavita O Meghadhuta" may also be mentioned for his perception of the 'modern', besides his numerous essays in the pages of the magazine 'Kavita' {1935-61}. Probably he spoke the most on the Bengali 'modern'). He was active in the Progressive Writers' Association in the late 30s and the Anti-Fascist Writers and Artists' Association in the early 40s--both before Independence and the birth of the nation. 'Comparative Literature: Germany and India' brought out by the JU Dept.) The thrust was of course on the non-English (there anti-colonial to a degree) West, mother-tongue and traditionAlong with these traces, it also harbours within its discourse his argument for the importance of each Indian language and its literature to take central position in the literary map of India after independence, his involvement in the Progressive Writers’ Union not in terms of political ideology but in terms of artistic freedom as a defining concept in a free, democratic country quote from textadded a special dimension to the ideal of a "mother tongue" in a milieu of mental colonization. Indeed, his multilayered analytic skill, his practice as critic and poet and translator, and last but by no means least his ability as an inspiring and inspired teacher laid the foundations of Comparative Literature in India

[Potentially, India is one of the richest fields for Comparative Literature. The age and complexity of our civilization, the diverse elements that compose it, that 'world-hunger' of which Tagore spoke a hundred times and which took possession of us with the dawning of our modern age - all these provide the material and atmosphere demanded by the nature of this discipline. The history of India is a story of absorption, adaptation and assimilation, of continual coming to terms with foriegn influences, and of resistance transformed into response. We have great links with many cultures of the East and West; our religions have influenced Western thought; interest in our arts and literatures is now keen and widespread. If Comparative Literature is permitted to develop, it can be of service in bringing India and the world spiritually closer and it can make a small contribution to the growth of that cosmopolitan spirit which is much more discussed than achieved. Nothing reveals the soul of a nation as clearly as does its literature, nor is there any other thing where the basic unity of mankind is felt with such force and animation. The controversy provoked by Comparative Literature at Jadavpur can in itself be regarded as a sign ot its viability, and its necessity has been recognized at least by the Bengali department of Calcutta University which has recently introduced a Comparative paper for the study of one literature other than Bengali, but connected with it.]

(The article 'Comparative Literature in India' by Buddhadeva Bose first appeared in the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 8 (1959), 1-10.)

The emergence of Comparative Literature as a concept in the western world may be dated from Goethe's (1749-1832) use of the term "world literature," which he coined in the last decade of his life as a reaction to Romantic -- even pre-Romantic -- literary criticism, breaking through the traditional limits of Occidental literature by revaluating popular poetry and the literatures of the Middle Ages and of the Orient. "I am more and more convinced," Goethe remarked, "that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men . . . I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach." Speaking to his young disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in January 1827, the seventy-seven-year-old Goethe used his newly minted term Weltliteratur, which passed into common currency after Eckermann published his Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens in 1835, three years after the poet's death. It is mere speculation (but certainly a speculation that the comparatist can take as her point of departure) to wonder whether the imperial ambitions of napoleon and the consequences which the German principalities faced because of the aggressive cultural and political ascendance of France in Europe led Goethe to term “nationalism” as unmeaning, and proceed to cast literature in the guise of an equalizer, a weapon of peace rather than war. The idea of Comparative Literature, then, is from its very inception a radical idea that refigures divisive antagonisms based on given and assumed parochialisms into relations of engagement and exchange – in other words, an idea and ideal for the future.


[acknowledgements: www.complitju.org]
P.s I wasnt even awar that our department had a website, i am sure no one else is aware of it as well. I did a google and it popped up in the second page

Jabberwocky

Ok. Now. Don't leap at my throat or do other violent things of that nature, but unaware, ...well...uh ignoramus, as I am, never having subscribed to The Statesman, and never having lived in a place where it was in vogue, and also, never having heard of a man called Samantak Das, I hadn't gotten around to reading so much as a single installment of Jabberwocky.

In fact, if it weren't for the mad, Alice-obsessed English teacher foisted upon us in school who, convinced that I spent most of my free time in the library because I cherished a great love for the right books and not because it was the only quiet, airconditioned place around, insisted on having rambling 'discussions' wherein he would proceed to acquaint me with the depth of my ignorance (har har), which caused me to all but abandon the thought of ever picking up another book to read for fear of the vastness of things to read and the utter inadequacy of my intellect to absorb and keep all of it archived neatly somewhere within the reach of memory's retrieval system, I would still, very happily, have been completely unaware of the term Jabberwocky, and would have thought the clever people who started Blabberwocky (the JUDE wall magazine, for the uninitiated) invented /Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came./

But thats not the point. There is a point. I'm getting to it, I think.
Yes.
Jabberwocky. Don't you just adore the idea? Of the poem, I mean.

They give a fancy name to it, portmanteau, I think, and (ok i must digress again, but I'll get back to The Point, I promise) we all do it all the time. Especially people in certain social units. Among droogs. Gangs. Communities. Whatever. Make up your own language. Make sense of what seems nonsense to others. Jargon. Leetspeak. Injokes. Lotr spawnages. Newspeak. Nadsat. One of the JU professors I do read, because The Telegraph presents itself wedged clumsily on my door handle religiously every morning, wrote about this phenomenon of a flourishing alternate idiom amongst certain sections of society. This thing created to exclude. Srin said something the other day- people come together under this common presupposition of aamra shob jaani tomra kichhu jaano na. Or something like that, I think. Because aamra tar theke tomra ta ke toh separate kortey hobey, na ki, for a distinct group to form. We're all looking to be perceived as something distinct, tai toh.

Ok. Enough digression. Now I've completely forgotten why I'd started.

But Samantak Das.
Yes.
And the joys of Jabberwocky.
Right.

So I googled Samantak Das within quotes(217 matches) today at random to see if I could read what he might've written about Romanticism and Scholar trawled through the net to present me with an utterly unhelpful page that listed papers on migrants' rights, Indian overland exports and the economy. But gogle was more forthcoming. Led me to The Statesman article about Singur where he asks us to decide which side we are on. This, btw, is quoted in about three dozen blogs. Then Jabberwocky, which(in my humble opinion) should be the stuff of much more idle idolatry than the usual omg-he's-such-a-byapok-teacher-such-captivating-eyes and so on and so forth.

Therefore, the following:

Jabberwocky: Trading in words
Section: Campus Date:Feb 21,2007

Samantak Das

WHAT do these have in common — aspirin, bikini, cellophane, escalator, gramophone, heroin, jungle gym, lanolin, petrol, pogo stick, spandex, trampoline, yo-yo, zipper? These are all examples of what are called “fully generic (or genericised) trademarks”, that is to say, words that started out as proprietary trademarks but have since become so completely identified with generic products that most folks are not even aware that they were trademarks to begin with.
I made up this list from a much longer one in that invaluable companion for all researchers (and columnists hurrying to meet deadlines!), the Wikipedia, when I was looking up “heroin”. Apparently, heroin derives its name from the trademark “Heroin”, assigned to diacetylmorphine, or diamorphine, by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant, in whose lab the drug was synthesised in 1897 by Felix Hoffman. Bayer named the newly synthesised drug “heroin” because in field trials persons who were given the drug felt heroisch (German for “heroic”).
Even more interestingly, Hoffman had synthesised another drug in the same laboratory just 11 days earlier, which, too, has now become a fully generic trademark – aspirin. While the naming of aspirin is not as intriguing as that of heroin (a combination of “a-”, referring to the acetyl group, “-spir-”, from the plant genus Spiraea, and “-in”, a popular ending for drug names of the time), what is interesting is that of the two drugs – aspirin and heroin – it was the latter that was considered the more effective and “healthier” painkiller!
But let me quit all this talk about drugs, addictive or otherwise, and come back to genericised trademarks.
While the list I started this column with is that of trademarks that have become fully genericised, there are others that seem to be well on their way to so becoming, even though their owners may not like what is happening to their precious marks. Chief among these would be Band-aid, Frisbee, Google, Jacuzzi, Jeep, Vaseline, Walkman and, of course, Xerox. (In deference to their officially proprietary status, I’ve capitalised the initial letter of these words.)
Users of the English language, with typical ingenuity, have made further extensions from these likely-to-be-generic-soon trademarks, turning, or example, some of them into verbs. I’m certain we’ve all, at some time or the other, asked someone to “please xerox two copies of these for me” or have “googled” a name to find out more about a person, place or thing. Some are even used as adjectives, for example a “non-jeepable road” (a phrase I first came across in the mountainous terrain of north Bengal) or a “non-googleable question” (created by that obsessive sub-species of humanity, the quiz fiend, to refer to a question whose answer cannot be found by “googling” it). And it seems only a matter of time before someone describes a wound as “non-band-aid-able”.
Let me leave you with what was, for me, the most interesting discovery in Wikipedia’s list. For many years I’ve wondered exactly why motorcycle mechanics insisted on calling the small angled hexagonal wrench, used to tighten screws with a hexagonal hole on top, an “alanki”. (As in, “Ei, allaki-ta dey to!” – shouted to a helper by the head mechanic in a garage.) Now I know. An “Allen key” or “Allen wrench” was the trademark name given to their hexagonal wrench by the Allen Manufacturing Company, located in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Taken over and turned generic, such wrenches have now become “Allen keys”, a term preferred to their proper nomenclature of hex key or hex-head wrench.
The next time I go to get my bike fixed, I’ll know just how to impress my usually imperturbable master mechanic pal.

(Samantak Das’ longest love affair has been with the weird and wonderful ways of the English language.)

new semester woes

A new semester has long since begun...and it seems like a herculean task to understand and study the various texts...i am at sea regarding what is being taught and which texts are to be followed....last semester i knew i was terrible at Indian Literature but i knew i was good at World literature which would help me scrape through....but this semester i am at a loss because i know i am not good at anything....we have 3 honours papers and yet i don't know who is teaching us what...i am petrified of ICY mam[yup that's how i refer to IC mam] so i try hard to pay attention and moreover i try my best to hang onto everything she says..her classes are really interesting....Subha Di is good but her teachings go tangent above my head...i like Debashree dis class....RC mam seems to have gone,never to return again...Protabh babu..erm well...i haven't really attended his classes yet...and Sujit da...well my fault i cant understand even if he teaches oh so well....so the word is that,i am dumb and getting dumber by each semester....

Well.................

Gabriel García Márquez- The Nobel Lecture

A few days back in class our Professor referred to García Márquez's Nobel Lecture. She had asked us to check it out on the net. She had also said it would definitely be worth the while.
Trust me it was....
I've read it over and over again in the past few days....
So here it is for everyone to enjoy and appreciate...

"The Solitude of Latin America

Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.

This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold.

Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.

One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.

I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."


From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993

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