The items displayed are the audio-visual teaching aids used over the years by the Department of English, Providence Women’s College, to impart quality education. The collection includes gramaphone records, cassettes and a cassette player, a transistor radio, an overhead projector (OHP), and film rolls among others.
The Film Club of the Department of English organises a screening of the classic Swedish film Wild Strawberries (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1957) at 9:30 AM on 2 June 2023 in the III BA English classroom, followed by an interactive session on 5 June 2023. The interactive session will be led by Dr. Jenson Joseph, Assistant Professor, DA-IICT Gandhinagar. All are welcome.
To the Housefly I killed
Today I killed you.
And I add that in my portfolio.
For you aren’t an easy target.
You’re swift and dynamic.
And I am proud I killed you.
Why? You sat on my food.
Where else you had been?
In dirt and decayed?
You go on the ripe and the rotten,
On the food and the feces alike.
You may haven’t suck my blood,
Nor you have bitten me hard.
But you spoiled my needs,
You soiled my dreams,
So I killed you.
You did hurt me.
You took away
What I needed the most
When I wanted it so badly.
So I killed you.
You aren’t the romantic “fly”
As you had been for Blake.
You’re the nuisance.
You and your tiny maggots
Are disgusting in my eyes.
So I killed you.
You ruptured my rapture.
You forcefully withdrew my plate.
You left my hedonic hunger unfed.
So I killed you
And you’re the crime
I do not regret.
About the author: Rashida Muneer Chalilakath is a PhD scholar at the Dept. of English, Providence Women’s College.
The research scholars and PG students of the Department of English, Providence Women’s College, Kozhikode, invite abstracts to a national seminar titled “Beyond Body: Speculations and Theorisations in Posthumanism”, to be conducted on 10 February 2023. The keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Arunlal K., Assistant Professor, Govt. College, Mokeri. For more details, please refer to the brochure linked below:
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
Book Review
By Hanan Ashraf, III BA English
As Indians, we have it in our blood to celebrate anything and everything big and fat. So when the mic in our college screamed out about an alien invader*, my generous heart began to plan and plot, weighing possibilities on how to make these days truly productive. I dreamt that finally my TBR pile would get moksha from the attic in my house and would be promoted to my coffee table.
Hence, I picked this book named 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari because why not? When would I get a time more apt in the 21st century to fully assimilate the entire scary scenario being portrayed in the book? I expected it to be the usual rant by those woke people who keep on filling pages in their books about how humans would be next after dinosaurs to be completely wiped out from the planet through an encounter with a comet, but oh boy! The author introduces us to a baggage of relatable problems which, if unchecked, could get malicious and wipe out the entire human race.
In this book, the author helps readers participate in some of the major conversations of our time and tries to stimulate further thinking. This book clearly reflects the author’s mastery in drawing logical connections between all the topics discussed by breaking them into sensible debates. Written in 2018, this masterpiece seems prophetic.
“In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power”.
The author begins by stating that, world until now is full of stories varying from the fascist story to the communist story and the liberal story. However, since the 2008 global crisis, people all over the world have become disillusioned with the liberal story. Walls and firewalls are back. Resistance to immigration and trade agreements are mounting. Ostensible democratic governments undermine the independence of the judiciary system, restrict the freedom of press and portray any opposition as treason. Who is to be blamed? The government or the public?
Blaming the regime comes easy but what about the people who just don’t want to give up their racial, national or gendered privileges. The author has concluded that liberalisation and globalisation are huge rackets that empower a tiny elite at the expense of the masses. He also proves that liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption.
Some of the major topics of discussion of our time are answered by Harari in the coming chapters: what would be the nature of jobs with the advent of AI? How are we going to combat the greater threats unleashed by the merger of infotech and biotech? Are we losing the game to AI because our ability to understand and explore human emotion (the ability that generated jobs despite the Industrial revolution and advent of machines) is no more our monopoly? The author introduces us to the novel fact that our choice of everything from food to mates results not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Are we mere biochemical algorithms that could be easily cracked by it?
Yuval Noah Harari
During the time of the Coronavirus pandemic, one of the major challenges we faced was the shortage of medical healthcare workers and the threat of them being infected by the disease. Here comes the relevance of AI which could replace millions of individual humans with an integral network. If WHO identifies a new disease or a cure, it could easily update the AI doctors within split seconds. So what would be the nature of jobs in the post AI world? All these questions are cleverly answered by the author with great precision and by weighing the pros and cons of it. The brighter side is that, instead of humans trying to compete with AI, they could focus on servicing and leveraging AI.
The human beings who consider themselves as the masters of the world might receive a deathblow with Harari’s theory of a useless class. By 2050 a ‘useless’ class might emerge not merely because of an absolute lack of jobs or lack of relevant education, but also because of insufficient mental stamina to cope up with the highly volatile nature of the job market. Slowing the pace of change may give us time to create enough new jobs.
The governments are trying to introduce various schemes for supporting their citizens. In India, the PM-Kisan scheme or the PMJDY scheme serve as examples. The author tries to give a clarity in this area by raising the question whether the government should implement Universal Basic Income or Universal Basic Services? He gives a clever answer that the real problem is in defining what ‘universal’ and ‘basic’ actually mean.
Harari yet again makes us think by posing a question that if biotechnology enables parents to upgrade their children, would this be considered as a basic human need or would we see humankind splitting into different biological castes, with rich superhumans enjoying abilities that far surpass those of poor Homo Sapiens? Consequently, the gap between the rich and the poor might become not merely bigger but actually unbridgeable, says the author. We have witnessed a similar situation in our state, but for a different reason when a girl allegedly committed suicide because she couldn’t attend her online classes due to the unavailability of internet.
The author also says that, to really achieve its goal, universal basic support will have to be supplemented by some meaningful pursuits or hobbies because studies have proved that despite being poor and unemployed such men enjoy higher levels of life satisfaction. If we manage to combine a universal safety net with strong communities and meaningful pursuits, losing our jobs to the algorithms might actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise. It is not a coincidence that most of us have remained sane during the COVID-19 lockdown by indulging in such creative activities.
We all know that the rise of digital dictatorship is a big shark to deal with. The author predicts that soon the authority might shift from humans to algorithms. For, once somebody gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show, as we have seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal which revealed that data entrusted to Facebook was harvested by third parties and used to manipulate elections across the world. The recent Sprinkler case if true also serves as another example.
Currently, the computers could understand our body more than we do and they could even diagnose diseases from the cellular level. Harari says that “people will enjoy the best healthcare in history but for the same reason they will probably be sick all time”. Have you guys noticed that currently due to the lockdown the hospitals are almost empty with patients close to zero with much lesser cases leading to death? So is the entire hospital business a scam creating unnecessary fear in the mind of people, or is it due to the decreased pollution level and negligible interaction with society and healthy lifestyle?
As George Orwell envisioned in 1984, the television will watch us while we are watching it. We are gradually losing our ability to make decisions for ourselves. We no longer search for information, instead we Google it and the ‘truth’ is defined by the top results of the Google search. The author’s findings in this area should be seriously taken into account because the real problem with robots is exactly the opposite of what we think it is. Harari says that we should fear them because they will probably always obey their masters and will never rebel, no matter how heartless and crazy the orders are.
Another thought put forward by the author is individual discrimination. What happens when algorithms are used to conduct interviews or to look into your application for bank loans? There is something specific about you that the algorithm dislikes. You don’t know what it is and, even if you knew, you can’t organise with other people to protest because there are no other people suffering from the exact same prejudice. Instead of collective discrimination, in the 21st century, we might face a growing problem of individual discrimination. If we are not careful we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.
Any solution to the technological challenges has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level.
As human beings, in order to flourish, we still need to ground ourselves in intimate communities and this is the best time that serves as an example because the lockdown has forced us to break all communal ties that has in turn made us greatly frustrated and alienated. Thankfully, the revolution in the field of online streaming and other digital platforms has helped us to stay connected in such difficult times.
But has the advent of social media really changed the picture for the betterment of human beings? People live ever more lonely lives on an ever more connected planet. In most cases, online comes at the expense of offline and people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it through the number of likes and comments they receive and in the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. So can we solve the problem by finding a middle path? The author points out that, when the tech giants aim at reducing the chasm between offline and online, they end up making biometric sensors and direct brain-computer interfaces where electronic machines literally get under our skins and we may come to miss the good old days when online was separated from offline.
Is nationalism overrated? Do the world leaders save the world by fanning our nationalistic sentiments or is it a form of escapism from the great global problems we face? The author tries to remind us that a common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity and humankind right now has at least 3 such enemies; nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption.
As long as the world remains divided into rival nations, it will be very hard to simultaneously overcome all the 3 challenges and we don’t have the luxury to evade these as trivial matters like what is done by most of our world leaders.The author strategically lays a plan before us and says, “We now have a global ecology, a global economy and a global science but we are still stuck with national politics but we should develop a strategy where within countries and cities global problems and interests should be given larger priority”.
The immigrant crisis and the resultant dilemma is explained in this book by exploring various new aspects of the crisis like how the traditional racism is waning and ‘culturists’ have taken hold of the world. It also explains how terrorism is overrated in terms of the actual damage it causes and how it is blown out of proportion by the governments and media to divert public attention from actual problems and bring fear in the minds of people. The actual damage it causes is much lesser than that caused by lifestyle diseases and car accidents.
What is the difference between war and terrorism? What is a knowledge illusion? What should be the nature of an ideal education system in a world where change is the only constant? In this world where information is right under our fingertip, clarity is king. In order to gain wisdom amidst the garbage out there one should have “a well-formed mind instead of a well-filled mind”. This book acts as the right antidote to the knowledge illusion and helps in the formation of unique perspectives regarding the changes happening around us in the 21st century.
*The author is talking about the announcement regarding the suspension of classes in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Regrettably, no aliens have contacted the college yet.
An article by Surya S., I BA English
No matter how many stories we read or movies we watch, the ones about friendship always finds a special place in our heart. No other sitcom has ever kept me glued to the screen like Friends. It was the first series that I had watched and has remained my favourite until today. I loved each and every season of this ’90s sitcom. It revolves around six friends hanging out and living together in New York City. Every character is relatable to us, there is probably a geeky Ross in your group who has more knowledge in dealing with dinosaurs than women, a Monica who has an OCD with cleaning, a foodie Joey whose second love is ladies, a Phoebe who is always “wonderfully weird” and a Rachel who is a fashion freak. It’s been 25 years since the show has been released and yet it’s still one of the most watched sitcom. One of the reasons for its success is a strong script by Crane and Kauffman and directors like James Burrows. The series won the 2002 Emmy award for outstanding comedy series. There isn’t a time that I don’t laugh, watching the show. The actors were so good that it is impossible, even to think of someone else playing their roles. They were good friends both on and off-screen. Maybe that is the secret behind the chemistry between them. I envy Joey and Chandler’s relationship, they have the best bromance between them. It is captivating in many ways, but I think the best thing about Friends is how timeless it is. And it was way ahead of its time — Carol and Susan’s lesbian wedding, Chandler’s dad becoming a transgender, Monica dating her father’s friend, Ross kissing Chandler’s mother and the male nanny were all uncommon at that time. And something else that I have noticed in the show was that all the female leads were given unconventional ways of pregnancy, Phoebe became the surrogate mother of her brother’s triplets, Rachel took the huge step of becoming a single mom, and Monica who was obsessed with babies was infertile and later became the mother of adopted twins. The show is about the six of them navigating friendship, relationship, and life in New York city.
Monica is the shepherd of the group. She is the one who holds the group together. Monica is Ross’s sister. Their sibling fights, arguments, love and care for each other will make us yearn for someone like that in our lives. They’ve never let each other fall out. She is famous for her leadership qualities and organising skills. But she is known more for being a cleanliness fanatic. If there is something that she can’t stand, it’s a messy room. There was an episode wherein she went herself to clean one of Ross’s date’s apartment, when she heard how untidy it was. She is a great cook and chef by profession. I love her high pitched bossy voice and her “I KNOW”s. The fat Monica episodes were so hilarious that I’ve lost count the number of times I re-watched it. Her first serious relationship was with Richard, her dad’s friend, who was twenty one years older than her. It was indeed one of those stereotype breakers in the show. But the relationship didn’t last long as Richard didn’t want to take the responsibility of being a father and a family man again. Later, towards the end of the fourth season, she unexpectedly begins a relationship with her long-term friend Chandler. They both try to hide their relationship from their friends, but eventually everyone finds out. Monica and Chandler were the best couple in the show. Their love for each other was infinite.
Joey played by Matt Le Blanc is a much loved character from the show. Joey is a handsome, young, not-so-bright struggling actor who would rather sell his kidney than share his food. If Joey is good at something other than eating, it’s flirting. He is a womaniser who has dated a lot of girls throughout the series. His pick-up line “ How you doing?” must be the most repeated dialogue in the whole series. But he is the most loyal friend in the gang. His best buddy is, of course, Chandler. Their journey from roommates to best friends was filled with fun. Le Blanc’s expressions are priceless, he truly is a great actor. The irony in his character was that even after dating so many women throughout the series, he is the only one who remains single when the show ends.
Rachel is a fashionista. She is the spoiled but warm-hearted girl who left her groom at the altar. She flees from her wedding to find Monica, her high school friend. She eventually becomes Monica’s roommate and one among the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. The spoiled child then finds her way in the world. Her decision to live without any financial support from her friends redefined her life. She began as a waitress at the Central Perk coffee house and later worked in the fashion world. I love her when she’s angry and yelling. Her relationship with Ross Geller was happy until he slept with another woman while they were still in a relationship. After breaking up with Ross, she dates a number of other men, but none lasts. Later, she becomes pregnant from a one night stand with Ross. The duo finally reunites in the final episode.
Ross is the most fragile character. He is an amazing brother, father, partner, and friend. He is incomplete without his dinosaur stories. He is that innocent nerd friend from your group. His most popular dialogue “we were on a break” always annoyed me. He is someone who takes pride in being a know-it-all. He is a three-time divorcée and father of his ex-wife Carol and Rachel’s daughter Emma. I sometimes hate Ross for his sexist remarks. He fired Emma’s nanny because he was a man and, according to him, babysitting is not something meant for “men”. It was his fault that led to his breakup with Rachel, but he tried to justify it, saying they were on a break. David Schwimmer did a great job presenting him on screen.
Phoebe is a “wonderfully weird” woman. She is my favourite among the female leads. I love how kind, generous, loving, and emotional she is. She is that go-to person who can give you the best advice. She will be there whenever you need a shoulder to cry on. Her epic song “smelly cat” has still not left my lips. Unlike the others, her childhood was not a bright one, yet she strived hard and lived independently. Her only blood relatives were her grandmother and twin sister Ursula who never acknowledged her existence. Her love for nature made me love her even more. She never took into account what others thought about her, she did things the way she liked without any embarrassment. She finally finds her “family” in Mike Hannigan , played by Paul Rudd.
Chandler Bing played by Mathew Perry is my favourite. He is the king of sarcasm. He’s funny throughout the ten years. His jokes catch you right at your tickle spots so that it’s pretty hard not to laugh. I love everything about him — his sarcastic comments, his victory dance, his nervousness around people, his love for Monica, his friendship with Joey and a lot more. He is the one who taught us that it’s never too late to start doing what you love, by quitting his job of data reconfiguration to become a copywriter at an advertising agency. There can never be another Chandler Bing.
Finally, two other characters who deserve to be mentioned here are Gunther, the waiter at Central Perk coffee house and Janice, Chandler’s famous nasal ex-girlfriend with laughter like a machine gunfire. She is the one who makes us laugh by laughing. Gunther is one such character who is sidelined throughout the ten seasons. He had a huge crush on Rachel Greene, but it took him ten years to muster the courage to confess his love for her.
All in all, Friends is the best. Like the theme song says, the show “will be there” for us always. If you haven’t watched it yet, you are missing out on something really great. It keeps you both entertained and informed, and that is why it is special and the greatest sitcom of all times.
by Meghna Francis, III BA English
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you’d probably be familiar with the concept of K-dramas or Korean Dramas. These extremely addictive series are popular all around the globe especially with the rise of online streaming services and the Hallyu wave instigated by the South Korean Government which was using their soft power to gain a position in the global market. The Korean pop scene also has grown rapidly over the years.
What is it about these K-dramas that makes them so addictive? Well, a simple sentence cannot answer this loaded question.
My personal interaction with this category was back in 2014 when my friends had convinced me to watch a series called Boys Over Flowers which in their own words were “the best series to ever exist to date”. Succumbing to peer pressure, I too gave it a try only to be utterly turned off to the prospect of K-dramas for the next four years. The plot was very simple, a rich boy bullying a scholarship girl who stood up to him into liking him. In this series he has a) humiliated the girl in front of her peers b) asked his minions to sexually assault her (thankfully she was rescued by our chivalrous second male lead who was later rejected by our female lead for being too nice) c) kidnapped her and promptly gave her a makeover and so so many more intolerable actions. Quite frankly, I had promised myself never to watch another drama again as I (unlike my friends and the female lead) was not blinded by Goo Jun Pyo’s extremely good looks to overlook the red flags he had displayed all throughout the series.
Boys Over Flowers
It was later in 2018 that I watched Hello Monster, which was a really good crime thriller with an extraordinary cast that I had started tolerating K-dramas again. But a wrong step watching “The Heirs” and I found myself in a k-drama hiatus all over again.
Hello Monster
2019 marked the end of Game of Thrones, a series that had let me down after delivering 7 iconic seasons and I decided to go on an English series hiatus (You see a pattern now right?) and I stumbled upon While You Were Sleeping. Something about this really clicked with me. I loved the plot, the cast was brilliant, the soundtrack (OST) was unforgettable and it started my current K-drama obsession. And by the same time next year, I had watched nearly eighty K-dramas, if not more.
While You Were Sleeping
The biggest appeal of K-dramas to me was the fact that most of them had 16-20 episodes. Their plots are good, there’s always that element of comedy and unforgettable moments and it’s something you can enjoy with your whole family. There is something very innocent and sweet about this category of series, a certain je ne sais quoi that makes it a breath of fresh air from the usual dramas we are used to. And there’s always the plus point of learning a new culture and language. Three dramas in, I had already picked up certain Korean words and expressions, my favorites beings “Aighoo” (an exclamation similar to “oh my”), “Hajima” (don’t) and “Michyeosso” (are you out of your mind?).
K-dramas prove that you can fall in love with whomever, whenever you want. Till now they have established that one can fall in love with an alien (My Love from the Star), a mermaid (Legend of the Blue Sea), a goblin (Guardian: The Lonely and Great God), a grim reaper (Guardian: The Lonely and Great God), a cat that can turn into a human (Meow: The Secret Boy), a comic book character (W: Two Worlds), a Ghost (Bring It On Ghost), Two Princes from a different era (Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo), a freakishly strong girl (Strong Woman Do Bong Soon), a king who can travel across parallel universes (The King: Eternal Monarch), an angel who accidentally save your life (Angel’s Last Mission: Love), a thirty-year-old woman who thinks she is still seventeen (Still 17), a woman who transforms into someone else every week (Beauty Inside) and a man with an inability to recognise faces (The Secret life of my secretary). These are only a few examples amongst the vast ocean of K-dramas.
The writers go above and beyond to make sure these unlikely couples have a chance with their over the top scenarios. One of these cooked up unlikely scenarios is explored in the highly-rated “Crash Landing On You“. How does one portray a love story across uncrossable borders? Simple, have our South Korean female lead’s parachute get stuck in a hurricane which causes her to get stuck in North Korea where our valorous hero, a North Korean Soldier, rescues her from the rest of the North Korean army and her cunning family. Our female lead’s luck is so off the charts that she may as well win the lottery three times. These rom-coms usually appeal more to the international audience rather than the domestic ones. The Male Lead and Female Lead have to go through several trials and tribulations before they can finally be united. Extraordinary You, Her Private Life, What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim, Uncontrollably fond, The Beauty Inside, Touch Your Heart, Radio Romance, Devilish Joy are some of the most talked-about rom-com series.
Crash Landing On You
Extraordinary You
The appeal of K-dramas lies in their ability to appeal to one’s heart, we care about the characters and their world. They are lighthearted, when compared to their Hollywood counterparts, yet have a good storyline which makes you stay. Especially in the current scenario, where our reality looks so bleak, these dramas are a welcome distraction. Chances are that you’ve heard of some of these dramas or at least seen their remakes or dubbed editions. They can be categorized as the classic ones, the must-watch, so if you are new to K-dramas start with these ones. Guardian: The Lonely and Great God: A 900-year-old Goblin who is cursed with immortality searches for his Bride who can release him from his curse. The plot is good, the casting is great and the OST is phenomenal. It’s hilarious but heartbreaking. It took me a long time to get over the hangover of this series. Descendants Of The Sun is that one series that’s constantly referenced in Korean pop culture. It’s basically a love story between an army general and a doctor in a war-torn nation and the real-life drama surrounding this drama just boosted its ratings. (RIP to the Song-Song couple fandom.) Other such classic ones are Hotel Del Luna which tells the story of a young man who falls in love with an immortal woman whose punishment is to look after a hotel where souls can come to rest before they ascend to the spiritual plane, While You Were Sleeping which is a fantastical story of a man and woman who can see snippets of the future, My Love from the Star where a shunned actress meets an alien stuck on Earth and Legend of the Blue Sea in which a con-man meets a mermaid.
Guardian The Lonely and Great God
Descendants of the Sun
There are a lot of K-dramas that belong to the action/thriller genre with the most recent being Vagabond which has quite an enthralling plot with stunning visuals of Morocco and Portugal, then there’s Healer and Signal which are cult classics among k-drama viewers. Other popular crime thrillers are Tunnel, Defendant, Investigation Couple, Memorist, K2, Cruel City, Hyena, Voice, Mad Dog, and the recently added Rugal (I’m gonna ask you to sit this one out, popularity isn’t always an indicator of how good something is). One of my all-time favourite thrillers has to be Memories of the Alhambra which combines action with futuristic tech. As South Korea is one of the world leaders in cutting edge technology, they do not shy away from introducing technological aspects to their storytelling. A Piece of Your Mind which is a man’s journey in moving on from his ex-lover introduces an AI device, very similar to Alexa or Google Assistant which can recreate the emotions and feelings of another person. Are You Human Too? Is basically the Korean version of Rajnikanth’s blockbuster hit “Robot”. Then there’s the absolutely hilarious I’m Not A Robot with a cute plot filled with too many plot holes. My Absolute Boyfriend, Bong Soon – A Cyborg in Love and My Holo Love have all introduced AI characters that the audience are absolutely fond of. Love Alarm showed how an app that could pre-determine love could destroy the happiness of several.
Memories of the Alhambra
Are You Human Too
Vagabond
Historical dramas are also quite popular in South Korea. Mr Sunshine and Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo are bound to leave you crying for days. Love in the Moonlight, 100 Days My Prince, Rooftop Prince, Hwarang, Empress Ki, The Crowned Clown, Tale of Nokdu, Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung are some of the most popular ones. Kingdom uses a historical setting and incorporates zombies into the mix. Chicago Typewriter mixes historical and modern elements for the storytelling.
Chicago Typewriter
Fantasy is by far the single most popular genre in K-dramas. Be it a ghost, goblin, mermaid, gumiho, witch, or anything supernatural, is bound to be a hit. Mystic Pop-Up Bar, Hi Bye Mama (keep tissues nearby, you will definitely be a crying mess at the end of it), The King: Eternal Monarch, A Korean Odyssey, Abyss, Secret Garden, Arthdal Chronicles, 49 Days, My Girlfriend is a Gumiho, Bring it on Ghost, Strong Girl Bong Soon are some of the popular ones in this genre.
Strong Girl Bong Soon
K-dramas have no problems diving into darker themes. One of the most top-rated series, Sky Castle has more twists and turns than the Thamarassery Churam. It tells the story of some affluent families who are trying their best to get their children to go to one of the SKY colleges (Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University) and the various tactics they employ to do so. The most recent and highest rated k-drama of all time, The World Of The Married tells the story of a doctor who discovers her husband is cheating on her. Hence begins the psychological warfare that had both the Koreans and the international fans hooked. K-drama twitter was shaken by the absolute craziness that ensued in this drama. The recent addition to this genre was Netflix’s Extracurricular which tells the story of a high school student who is trying to run a prostitution chain. I Remember You or Hello Monster as if it is popularly known is a worthy addition to this list. Dark comedies like Prison Playbook and satires like Misaeng and The Producers have also found a place in the hearts of K-drama lovers.
Sky Castle
K-dramas don’t shy away from talking about serious issues in Korean society. They have often been praised for dissolving myths and raising public awareness on certain issues. It’s Okay That’s Love discusses Tourette syndrome, genophobia, and schizophrenia, Hyde, Jekyll and Me and Kill Me, Heal Me discusses Dissociative Identity Disorder, The Girl Who Sees Scents discusses synesthesia and congenital analgesia, My Mister discusses PTSD and depression, Find Me In Your Memory tells the story of a woman who forgets the death of her friend as a psychological defence mechanism and Fix You deals with anger management issues. The recent cult favourite Itaewon Class discuses issues like racism and LGBT rights. Cheese In The Trap introduces a male lead who is considered to be a sociopath. Women’s rights have been discussed in series like Search WWW, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Mother, Avengers Social Club, Woman of Dignity, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, and Be Melodramatic. The 2018 hit series My ID Is Gangnam Beauty tells the story of a girl who was bullied because of her looks which causes her to undergo plastic surgery and how she still faces harassment because of that. Korean beauty standards have been criticized for being too unrealistic and this series illustrates exactly why it’s so harmful. Such dramas are quite lacking in other languages and hopefully, we get to see more of these.
My ID is Gangnam Beauty
Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo
Then there’s the slice of life/coming of age dramas which is yet another favourite amongst both domestic and international K-drama viewers alike. The relatability factor of these dramas are the best examples of collective experiences. Because this is my first life, Itaewon Class, Search WWW, Be Melodramatic, Moment at Eighteen, Hospital Playlist, Fight For My Way, When The Weather Is Fine, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Something In The Rain, and Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim are some of the cult classics. The crown jewels of this genre has to be the ever so popular Reply series (and also the School series, but the Reply series- Reply 1988 specifically wins hands down).
Reply 1988
Itaewon Class
One of the most defining factors of K-drama is how it can cause an existential crisis the moment it’s over. You’ve been invested in the lives of these characters for almost 8 weeks (if you’re watching it while it airs) or 16+ hours, and their sudden absence makes you clueless as to what to do next. God forbid if it’s one with a sad ending, you’re gonna be in mourning for the next couple of days. There’s a vacuum created in your heart which can only be filled with more K-dramas.
If you’re into K-Pop (which you most likely will be if you’re into K-dramas; these two come hand-in-hand) you’re gonna be overjoyed as many K-pop idols have delved into the field of acting. From cameos to main roles, you can definitely spot a few of your favs on the silver screen. Park Hyung Sik of ZE:A, most EXO members, V from BTS, Bae Suzy from Miss A, IU, Super Junior’s Choi Siwon, SF9’s Rowoon and Chani, GOT7’s Jinyoung and BTOB’s Yook Sunjae are just some of them.
One of the biggest gifts K-dramas have gifted fans with is their OST. The best of the music world are employed with the task of creating a befitting soundtrack. No matter how bad a drama is, the OST is the saving grace. If done right, they can even make you relive the drama every time you listen to it. Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, Descendants of the Sun, While You Were Sleeping, Crash Landing On You and Hotel Del Luna are known for their amazing soundtracks.
There has never been a better time to watch K-dramas than right now. You have plenty of free time and need something to take your mind off from everything that’s going on. At the end of the day, that’s what K-dramas are – an escape from the mundane everyday life, a world that’s similar to the one that we live but better. So take a break from scrolling through your social media feeds and watch some K-drama!
Reviews of two pandemic films by Nayana Alphonsa Mathew, II Sem MA English
The pandemic of Coronavirus (COVID-19) is raging across the globe today. The virus brought us to months of Lockdown and eventually to Quarantine, which we were not familiar with. This virus made the term ‘Quarantine’ so widely used, the Lockdown period marking it as the most popular word on social media. #QuarantineSelfie, #QuarantineMood, #QuarantineDays….the hashtags go on. However, this Quarantine period, which came into being as part of the pandemic, was fruitfully used by many people to dust off their hidden talents. Some others, however used this time to binge watch their favourite movies and TV shows. In short, this is a time when media service providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime have made the most financial gains.
While series such as Money Heist and Dark have grown in popularity during this time, the movies like Contagion (2011) and Virus (2019) have also risen to fame because of the quality and freshness in their plot and making. These films have many parallels to the crisis that we face today. The American thriller Contagion (2011) deals with a fictional virus MEV-1, and the movie is front-loaded with fear before turning into an alarming sociological study of what people would do during a quite realistic seeming pandemic. Virus (2019) is an Indian film, which is based on the true events encompassing the 2018 Nipah Virus outbreak in Kerala and the local community’s mobilisation effort to stop the spread. Both these films, speak of some deadly pandemic that has hit their home country or state, and how they fought against it. The scenes from these movies are strangely similar to the ones we witness now, as, much of the world moves into Quarantine to put a check on the novel Coronavirus.
CONTAGION (2011)
CAST: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet
DIRECTOR: Steven Soderberg
SYNOPSIS: Beth Emhoff returns from a business trip to Hong Kong with a stopover at the Chicago airport, where she meet with her ex-lover. Beth feels ill, but thinks the problem is jet lag. She travels back home to Minneapolis and spreads the virus to her son Clark and to her husband, Mitch. When Beth and Clark die, Mitch goes in quarantine, where the doctors realise he is immune to the mysterious virus. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, London and in a small province, cases of the mysterious illness are cropping up, as the American Centre for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation give their best effort researching the virus. As the contagion spreads to millions of people worldwide, societal order begins to break down as people panic.
REVIEW
Contagion (2011) is a pragmatic, unsensational film about a global pandemic. Being an American thriller, it gives us a terrifying speculation about a new airborne virus, and how it could enter a living person and spread unceasingly in a very short time. The virus in Contagion (2011) is a mysterious one. It openly resist seclusion, rejecting cure. When we think, why the world is suddenly obsessed with this movie right now, the answer would be that, this film by Steven Soderberg is prophetic in the manner it portrayed a pandemic and its repercussions.
The film begins with the character Beth Emhoff (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) returning from a Hong Kong trip with a disease no one has ever heard of. She dies soon, but what follows is precisely similar to what is going around the world right now. The disease, in the movie, is caused by a deadly virus, which is a mysterious one (later identified as MEV-1 virus) and it ends up taking the lives of thousands even as doctors make every effort to find a cure.
There are a few other things in the movie, which we can totally relate to our current situation. For instance, Beth Emhoff is identified as the index patient by the officials of WHO. But, the answer to how she gets infected with the virus is shown through a flash back scene, where, a bulldozer razes palm trees while clearing a rainforest in China that disturbs the natural habitat of some bats. One bat finds shelter in a pig farm and drops an infected piece of banana, which is eaten by a pig. The pig is slaughtered and prepared by a chef in Macau Casino, who transmits the virus to Beth through a handshake. So, all this started from an animal. Similarly, in the case of Coronavirus too, the epicentre of the pandemic is considered to be a meat-market in Wuhan province in China. But, when compared to the Coronavirus, the MEV-1 virus in the movie is highly deadly and contagious, which is impractical in the sense.
Personally, I found some parts in the movie very interesting. i.e., the movie makes use of some scenes which are scientifically accurate, to convey the seriousness of a highly infectious disease, to the audience. The scene in which the character Dr, Erin Mears (played by Kate Winslet) discusses RO (pronounced as R nought) and Fomites, is one of them. The RO value indicates how contagious an infectious disease is and hence it is an important marker to study the progression of a disease. Using the RO value, the transmission rate of a disease or its decline can be calculated. Fomites are precisely any object that can carry a pathogen. Fomites show how indirect transmission can happen among people compared to direct transmission through physical contact and body fluids.
There are some other things that the movie got right. The movie perfectly portrays how diseases can get transmitted among people. There are scenes, in which the people are feeding each other, sneezing or coughing, sharing objects etc… There is this scene, where the Kate Winslet’s character explains, that, “an average person touches their face 2000 to 3000 times a day.” The film got this right too. We do touch our faces thousands of times a day, and we share spaces with other people, which increases the chances of pathogen’s proliferation. The movie also capture the emotion of being the centre of an outbreak through a scene in which, the character Mitch Emhoff (played by Matt Damon) talks with his daughter from the other side of a glass window. There is this other character names Ally Hextall (played by Jennifer Ehle), who is a virologist working for the Centre of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is the creator of MEV-1 vaccine and she developed the vaccine by testing it on her own body, saving herself and millions of lives.
When we compare the movie with our present situation, we find that, in the movie, panic and fear increase rapidly because of the refusal shown by authorities in making announcements and providing information about the outbreak for several weeks. This caused the virus to spread rapidly and it killed about 25% of reported cases. This is what we see through the dialogue of character Lyle Haggerty (played by Bryan Cranston), where he says: “We just need to make sure that nobody knows until everybody knows.” On the contrary, with the current Corona outbreak, the WHO and other official bodies are providing us with information and updates regularly.
The tagline of the movie is “Nothing spreads like fear.” It is this fear that we see, when people, in the movie, scramble and breakout into fights at pharmacies to buy ‘Forsythia’, an herbal treatment which is rumoured to be a cure for the MEV-1 virus. This movie, in many ways, is an example of how everything could go dreadfully wrong if the information is not properly conveyed.
VIRUS (2019)
CAST: Indrans, Revathi, Rima Kallingal, Tovino Thomas, Sreenath Bhasi, Poornima Indrajith, Kunchacko Boban, Asif Ali, Soubin Shahir, Sharaf U Dheen, Indrajith Sukumaran, Joju George
DIRECTOR: Aashiq Abu
SYNOPSIS: A man named Zakariya Mohammed is infected and brought to the Govt. Medical College, Kozhikode, where he suffers from the symptoms of an unknown virus and after a few hours dies. He passes on the virus to 18 other people out of which 16 die. After enacting isolation and treatment protocols, a team led by the Minister of Health tracks the spread of Nipah Virus, using medical records, CCTV footages and in-person interviews.
REVIEW
One of the biggest achievements of the movie Virus (2019), lies in its casting. It is definitely, a strong point of director Aashiq Abu, that, he was able to gather so many artists for a single project. Each one gets limited screen and no character in particular is projected as a protagonist in the movie. As the film is based on real events that happened in Kerala, on the outbreak of Nipah Virus in 2018, it also features the real-life heroes who fought for Kerala at the time. This movie is a quintessential example for ‘perfect casting’. K.K Shailaja, The Health Minister of Kerala, has been magnificently portrayed by the veteran actor Revathi through her character C.K. Pramila. There is this dialogue delivered by this character, “When we tried to dig out the cause of spread of this pestilence, we found that, all those people were trying to help a suffering patient.” These words have caused an intangible sentiment in the minds of the audience. This emotion can be explained either as a joy of success, or, as a pain of losing someone or something. Similarly, the character of Akhila, a nurse, played by the actor Rima Kallingal, had a soul-stirring impact on the audience. This character is modelled after Lini, a nurse, who is a martyr in her battle with the Nipah Virus. Tovino Thomas, who portrayed the role of collector Paul V. Abraham, the one who, during the epidemic, embraced the district of Kozhikode with his perseverance, is also laudable.
But, beyond all this, there is this role by actor Poornima Indrajith, which caught my eyes. She played the role of The Director of Health Services, Dr. Smrithi Bhaskar, who could be considered the ‘next Ally Hextall’, as she, in a scene, agrees to test the vaccine on her own body. This scene, definitely, provides us with some realisation, which is so great, that, it teaches us about humanity and compassion. What we perceive through this scene is that, we are living in a world where humanity still exists, and we are surrounded by people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the wellbeing of mankind. Today, in the time of this Corona pandemic too, this realisation continues to grow.
Both Asif Ali and Sharaf U Dheen does a cameo appearance in the movie. Even though, both the actors’ cameo had them onscreen only for a few minutes, both their roles have taught us the pain of losing someone. Joju George, who played the role of an attender, also deserves an appreciation for his acting. The character of an ambulance driver, played by the actor Vettukili Prakashan, points to a group of employees who deserve commendation even during this hectic period of Corona pandemic. There are many characters with such less screen time, but all of their performances, especially by Indrans, Parvathy, Kunchacko Boban, Sreenath Bhasi, and Soubin Shahir, are worth mentioning.
There is this question asked by the character Jameela (played by actor Savithri Sreedharan), who is the mother of Zakariya, “Was it my child who gave it to everyone else?” this question shows the anxiety of a mother who fears that her son would be hated by the people. In the movie, when Zakariya is suspected of having a terrorist affiliation, solely because of being a Muslim (or a highly religious person, as mentioned in the movie), we are forced to think of the family in Kerala, that faced the same kind of accusation during the Nipah outbreak. The fact that many of us believed in such stories at the time of disaster is not one to be discarded.
Today, as we are surrounded by similar news that spread the speculation of Coronavirus being the Bio-weapon of China, we, people are confused about what to believe. However, the only thing we are sure of, is that, we will get through this, just as we survived the Nipah Virus.
An article by Greeshma Antony, II BA English
Irrfan Khan, 7 January 1967-29 April 2020
To lose two of the most acclaimed stars of Indian cinema to cancer amidst the coronavirus pandemic seems all the more tragic. The inconsolable loss still looms and their contributions will be fondly remembered.
Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor both passed away in April 2020
Irrfan Khan passed away at 53 on 29 April 2020, of complications from a rare neuroendocrine tumour. The obituaries and sentiments that have flooded the internet hails Khan as an inspiration. Despite his success in both Hollywood and Bollywood, Khan was never stained by the film industry’s pompousness. He remained humble and modest, a charismatic thespian. The extraordinary calmness he furnished derived a dignity which he fostered in most of his roles. His credited movies include The Warrior (2001), Maqbool (2003), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Life of Pi (2012), The Lunchbox (2013), Haider (2014), Piku (2015) and Hindi Medium (2017).
Irrfan Khan, in the thirty years of his acting career, took us through the minds of various characters, and gifted us some mesmerising performances. But perhaps the most memorable character he staged was that of the seemingly intricate Saajan Fernandes in the movie The Lunchbox.
The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, 2013)
The astonishing directorial feature of Ritesh Batra, The Lunchbox is one of the movies that comes only once in a blue moon.The movie initially unfolds as a grounded love story and matures into an existential commentary. It’s a snapshot of age-old Mumbai with its busy streets and passive sustenance, wherein two people develop a relation using letters they exchange enclosed in a lunchbox.
The movie stars Irrfan khan as Saajan Fernandes, an ageing official who awaits his retirement. As a widower with restrained emotions, he leads a monotonous life. Nirmat Kaur plays the role of an ailing wife, a fond mother and a devoted daughter in her debut role of IIa, a homemaker. Her husband is heedless of her feelings and the marriage which seems to have a neutral pace is thirsty for romance. Thus the two central characters seem to operate on completely different wavelengths but both live a life of quiet desperation.
Nimrat Kaur and Irrfan Khan in The Lunchbox
Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who plays Saajan’s assistant, stands out as a fervent character as opposed to Saajan’s cold demeanour. This clash of characters is humorous as well as consequential.
In a faulty coincidence, the Dabbawala service, one of the finest in Mumbai, mixes up the lunchbox that IIa packs for her husband and delivers it to Saajan. This continues and the two strangers communicate with the letters they hide in the lunchbox. It’s an unexpected friendship.The letters aren’t just conversational, but transform into parchments of their wounded souls.
Of all the themes that inhabit the film, the crucial one is the transience of human life and surroundings. It includes the condensed story-line of Mrs. Deshpande, IIa’s neighbour, whom we never see on screen, wonderfully voiced by Bharati Achrekar. Her life revolves around her husband who has gone into a coma for 10 years now. In one of his letters, Saajan remarks that if Mr.Deshpande were to wake up from his coma he would be shocked and disappointed at how the world turned out to be and would be wanting to go back to the coma stage. It is through these narratives the movie excels. Through its vulnerable characters, The Lunchbox speaks of how people lose themselves in the rush, forgetting, winding up confused and alone. It details this excruciating truth, “I think we forget things if there is nobody to remind us of them”as Saajan mentions in one of his letters.
Irrfan Khan in The Lunchbox
The Lunchbox is packed with precious moments. As the camera lingers over a streaky Mumbai, each scene is reminiscent of a longing. The film deviates from the typical Bollywood ideals into something more mature. For those craving a fairytale ending to this epistolary tale, Batra thinks otherwise, leaving the audience with moments to relish.
After all, The Lunchbox is not just a movie about two people falling in love, it’s a precious anecdote. A reminder that all the delicate emotions we keep locked up in our box, once freed, bakes a hopeful delicacy, as The Lunchbox leaves us well nourished.
Tracing Khan’s journey through the silver screen takes us through a wide array of characters. But there is something about his roles that makes us feel they were all written for him, carefully ordained. Be it the witty sarcastic Rana Chaudhary from Piku, the mysterious Roohdaar in Haider, a restrained Mr. Fernandes in The Lunchbox or the wannabe socialite Raj Batra in Hindi Medium, Khan took up versatile roles, mostly unconventional, and showcased them with utmost genuineness.
Irrfan Khan the Everyman
With not many traditional heroic roles in his celluloid career, with his hooded eyes and sensuous features, Khan was able to do something his Bollywood superstar colleagues were either unable or unwilling to. He imbibed his everyman roles, transforming himself to someone the audience connected with. His untimely departure will indeed be a great loss for Indian cinema.
an academic article by Sanjana R. Das, III BA English
Abstract
Dystopian fiction has been a relatively new genre in the canon of Indian English writings. It caught on in the Indian market around the late 1980s with the arrival of Penguin and the other five giants of the publishing world. “The post-1980s Indian novel’s own investment in the hold of the (colonial, national) past on India’s present has affected our readings of the entire genre to such a degree that the field of Indian novel studies is almost entirely dependent on a critique of historicity”(Anjaria, p2). So while literature in regional languages still flourish, a vast majority of the educated Indian audience opt to read in English. The post-millennial Indian English writers have made a concentrated effort to break away from this trend by bringing out our very own indigenous versions of the Western works that enjoy huge popularity and massive readership. Which in turn raises a critical question, are the post-millennial works of Indian fiction really ‘Indian’ in its essence?
This paper attempts to answer this very question by drawing comparisons between Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, and Margaret Atwood’s award-winning work The Handmaid’s Tale. In exploring the psyche of the two protagonists, Shalini and Offred; as well as their respective dystopian societies, one can clearly see what exactly makes Leila uniquely ‘Indian’.
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“Dystopia is usually understood to be ‘utopia’s twentieth-century doppelganger,’ one best exemplified by science and political fiction”(Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash I). Woven as they are with strong references to the real world, dystopian fictions function as powerful post-memory devices, simultaneously involved with both the past and the present, whose main developments are explored and amplified. Some of the most popular dystopian works of all time such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and the more recent ones like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, all attempt to portray such a horrifying reality that awaits the future generations.
Prayag Akbar’s Leila is a uniquely Indian take on this concept of dystopia. But what immediately strikes you upon first reading it, are the many similarities it holds to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both have female protagonists in their early 30s and 40s who struggle to hold on to the remnants of their sanity after their lives get utterly torn apart by the powers that be of their respective dystopian societies. Both of them are wives and mothers, who are forcefully separated from their daughters and husbands, for having dared to oppose the regime. Leila is set in near future India where the relentless obsession with caste, religion, and class has become ubiquitous. It attempts to hold up a mirror to all sections of society to show how everybody contributes to the realization of a dystopian future. What makes it even more terrifying is how familiar and plausible this ‘near-future’ reality feels. Ours’ is a society that holds onto its ideals of casteism and purity, no matter how ‘secular’ we claim ourselves to be. We live in a society, where hate crimes, lynchings, public shaming and ‘love jihads’ are commonplace. They represent the ugly countenance of our society, which we pretend not to see. We manage to convince ourselves every single time they happen, that such incidents are far and in-between. We do not wish for these harsh realities to intrude upon the ‘happy’ modicum of our lives. Fowler sums up this Ostrich attitude of human-beings very well when she states “The world runs on the fuel of endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look” (Fowler, p232).
At its crux, Leila narrates the tale of a mother’s untiring search for her daughter. This is made abundantly clear from the very first chapter where we come across the protagonist lighting two candles on the wall to commemorate her daughter’s nineteenth birthday, who she hasn’t seen for the past sixteen years. And yet, there are no discernable traces of uncertainty in her. She is quietly confident in her belief that such a reality would eventually come to fruition. This can be seen from how she never uses ‘if’, when talking about finding Leila, it’s always ‘when’.
Told from the perspective of this mother, whose sole reason for existence is the hope that she would one day reunite with her daughter, the story vacillates between Shalini’s memories of her childhood and that of her present-day reality in the ‘Towers’. She has long been drained of any further desire to live. Her daughter remains her last and only tether to the world of the living. She demonstrates throughout the course of the novel the extents to which she is ready to go, in order to find out any information regarding her daughter. Her easy compliance to the senseless outpourings of their psychiatrist at the ‘Purity Camp’, Dr.Iyer- is almost as sickening as the sexual abuse she has to endure at the hands of the councilmen. So is the case with Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale. Her memories of her daughter are so persuasive that she does not even introduce the topic – she seems to assume that her readers will be as aware as she herself is that when she speaks of ‘she’ for the first time in chapter five, it is her lost daughter whom Offred is recalling, even though the child has not previously been mentioned. In consciously trying not to think of her daughter, Offred attempts to prevent her high strung nerves from being strained any further. She realizes how precarious her own hold to sanity is and tries to preserve it.
Both Leila and The Handmaid’s Tale depict deeply religious and patriarchal dystopian societies, who view the law as ‘a moral system and not merely as an institutionalization of force’. This law is forcefully imposed upon the people without carrying within itself any account of its own legitimacy. In Leila, the society has been segregated in accordance to the law into different castes, and communities, enclosed within tall thick walls. They each own separate sectors, the entrances to which have been cordoned off to the members of other communities. The ones who dare to break these rules are punished severely and often killed. The Handmaid’s Tale on the other hand fully embodies speculative fiction’s aptitude for the extremes. It depicts a world where fertility rates have fallen to zero, and a theocratic, militarized government has taken power in the United States, and renamed it as the Republic of Gilead. Under this new regime, women are deprived of their basic rights including the right to own jobs and bank accounts. The few who are still fertile are taken away from their families and exploited as surrogate mothers by the rich caste of the Commanders. But compared to the purity obsessed caste-based society in Leila, the possibility of a theocratic society like that in Gilead coming into existence is even higher, because history has previously recorded such incidents. For instance, the Ceausescu regime in Romania made it mandatory for each woman to have four children at the very least. Another good example is the Nazi’s “Lebensborn” program, that provided young unmarried girls to SS families in order to produce more ‘ideal’ children.
Despite it’s very many similarities to The Handmaid’s Tale, Leila is unique in how it abounds with the ‘Indianness’ of its protagonist. What makes Shalini so different from Offred is precisely her ‘Indianness’. The married Indian woman is often depicted as being self-sacrificing and pious, whose existence revolves solely around that of her husband, and more importantly her kids. She has no existence outside of this and finds her comfort and happiness in theirs. ‘Sarvamsaha’ and ‘Pativrata’ are some of the virtues she is expected to uphold. The society expects this of them, as can be seen in the case of Queen Gandhari (wife of the blind Kuru King Dhritarashtra, who willingly chose to forsake her own sense of vision in order to accompany her husband in all his comforts and griefs). We applaud her courage, and willingness, and extoll her virtuous conduct. But no one dares to vilify her or ridicule her for this choice. She instead, has our eternal respect. Consciously, or unconsciously it is from this mould of an ideal Indian woman, that Prayaag Akbar draws inspiration from for Leila. Akbar’s Shalini, like a ‘good’ Indian mother, tries to take upon herself the responsibility for not having prevented the disaster from happening. In clinical psychology, a person who has a martyr complex is someone who seeks out suffering or persecution because it feeds a psychological need. Such is the case with Shalini, as with most Indian mothers. She feels responsible for not having protected her family. She is wracked with guilt over losing her daughter. While rationally being aware that what happened was inevitable, she is unable to shed this guilt, and it suffocates her from within. She blames herself for having been too ‘useless’. This becomes very much apparent, when after sending away the boy she accidentally meets while taking a walk along the streets beside the towers, she thinks to herself “Him too I did not protect” (Akbar, p35). She holds these ‘assumed’ guilts deep within herself and draws strength from them to stay steady on her mission. They weigh her down, and yet at the same time, they serve to anchor her sanity. Atwood’s Offred, on the other hand, does not try to assume guilt. She knows very well, who exactly are the ones responsible for her horrible plight. And while her situation could be considered even more terrible than that of Shalini’s, Offred refuses to even entertain the idea that her husband Luke could be dead. She is dead set on believing that he had somehow survived and that he would soon arrive to rescue her and their daughter. She refuses to accept otherwise, even though the rational part of her brain realizes this truth. We see how desperate she is to cling to this version of reality from how she cries and remonstrates herself after having unconsciously referred to her husband in the past tense “Is, I say. Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?”(Atwood, p239). Shalini on the other hand, after having watched her husband Riz bleed to death in front of her own eyes, is more ready to accept the reality of his death. And yet, this does not stop her from holding imaginary conversations and arguments with him. She firmly believes that his soul has yet to leave her side.
Shalini from Leila starts off as a forward-thinking progressive urban girl, who is unapologetic about having sex, drinking, and smoking. She leads an independent existence outside of the ‘laws’, thumping her nose at the patriarchal society. She has a job and a life outside of her family. But the moment she loses them, everything changes. Now she is desperate, to find out any details at all, and this desperation has gradually chipped away at her sense of self. She no longer has a life outside of her daughter. She becomes the ultimate ‘Indian’ mother. Offred, on the other hand, fights back and strives to hold onto her sense of self. Yes, she cares for her daughter, but hers’ isn’t that all-consuming need you see in Shalini. She fights back not just for the sake of her family, but also her own. Her inner thoughts deeply teem with sarcasm. They allow her to derive a perverse sense of pleasure in mocking her oppressors. She survives by numbing herself to her surroundings, by refusing to think. Because “Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last”(Atwood, p17). You see her refusal to give in to the circumstances at several instances spread across the novel. The very line she keeps muttering “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” is a testament to this. But then she comes across a photo of her eight-year-old daughter, and the fact that her child might not know of her existence devastates her. This becomes a turning point in her life, and she stops struggling so hard. You get a sense of her deep anguish from the lines “I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, from back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there” (Atwood, p238). In the wake of this realization, comes another- her existence has lost its purpose. This then numbs her to the outside reality and she briefly enters a state of oblivion, wherein she gives caution to the wind and decides to make the most out of her bleak reality. It is only the news of her friend Ofglen’s death that manages to shock her back into existence.
The most important lesson that these two works teach us, is that big changes don’t happen overnight but are often the results of a long drawn-out process. In both of them, it was the lack of an immediate and effective reaction against the abuse of political power that allowed things to degenerate and fall into dystopia. To conclude with, despite the many similarities in the lives of our two protagonists, the ‘Indianness’ of Shalini’s psyche, as well as that of the sectors provide a sharp contrast to that of Offred as stated above. Thus post-millennial Indian fiction, in catering to the needs of the reading audience, has to a large extent become capable of shaking off the effects of colonialism, and to make these works unique in their easy affectation of Indianness.
Works Cited
Akbar, Prayaag. Leila. Faber and Faber, 2019.
Anjaria, Ulka. A History of the Indian Novel in English. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Random House US, 2019.
Belluzzo, Cecilia. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ A Reflection on Sexual Politics and the Revolutionary Power of Dystopias. Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/38589039/_The_Handmaids_Tale_A_Reflection_on_Sexual_Politics_and_the_Revolutionary_Power_of_Dystopias.
Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016.
Gordin, Michael D., et al. Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton University Press, 2010.
“Indian Dystopian Fiction – My List for the Top 5 Indian Dystopian Novels.” Indian Book Nerd, 18 Jan. 2018, indianbooknerd.com/dystopian-fiction-in-india/.
Lacey, Nicola. “Violence, Ethics, and Law: Feminist Reflections on a Familiar Dilemma.” Figurationen, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, doi:10.7788/figurationen.2000.1.1.43.
Mondal, Mimi. “A Short History of South Asian Speculative Fiction: Part II.” Tor.com, 28 Feb. 2018, www.tor.com/2018/02/26/a-short-history-of-south-asian-speculative-fiction-part-ii/.
A Review by Neha Raj, III BA English
First things first, this is going to be a highly subjective review of a novel called The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Disclaimer: All the things said are based on personal reading experience and freedom of speech is to be valued. Also, there are major spoilers ahead. So if you are planning to read it, just stop right here.
When my friends were all waterfalls about Looking for Alaska and The Fault in our Stars, my eyes were, to be honest, mostly dry; the perpetual mourning following Matthias’ death in Six of Crows could barely wet the surface of my eyeballs; and Murakami, perhaps, came close in making me feel depressed with his ‘Toru’s, frequently disappearing cats, weird sex and with that whole sinister magic realism blended with umpteen images of loneliness. I might possibly strike you all as a murderous, cold human turned to stone by Medusa for good, but the truth is that I have a heart of a fruit fly – strength-wise. I believe the only feather in my cap is that I am a dangerous fan of Murakami, Plath, Salinger and people like Hosseini for that matter. Their books are monumentally depressing and faithful manifestations of how vile and dismal life can be at times. They offer us these unfortunate and unfavorable landscapes that we would never want to trek or acknowledge in our own lives but still would want to read, know and understand. Death, madness, fate, agony and heartache are some of the things that we would all love to see in a Netflix series or read in a Nicholas Sparks novel, but not so much in real life. Or so I used to think until I read The Song of Achilles, which, if I had to put it in one word– shattered me. The book, along with that, did three other things, out of which – two I will be eternally grateful, and one – not so much. First, Patroclus’ story was something that I wanted to be my own, from the excruciating restricted love-story to the horrendous Trojan gore. I understood what Miller meant, in its all forms, when she wrote, “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.” Second, as novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid puts it effortlessly, “I threw myself into ancient Greece” after reading her books. Third, I unfortunately cannot see the movie Troy anymore with Brad Pitt as Achilles and Patroclus as some sort of cousin of his or any retellings that claim Achilles and Patroclus were not lovers but rather ‘cousins’ or ‘close-companions’.
Not that this is relevant in any way or has anything to do with the review of the book, but I also somehow started to hate the fact that I am actually straight. Ah, talk about the perks of a good modern young adult version of an ancient epic.
Enough with the drama, let’s dive straight into the song sung. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a retelling of The Iliad by Homer in the age of heroes. Written from the perspective of an exiled ‘awkward’ prince Patroclus, an important yet shadowy character in The Iliad, it is a devastating love story between him and the mighty Achilles. Miller started writing this novel in her early twenties when she was still doing her undergraduate degree in Latin and Ancient Greek at Brown University, Rhode Island. It almost took her ten years to complete the novel, same as the Trojan War – from which she intelligibly and beautifully draws her story. It was the bestselling novel of 2011 and won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2012, making her the fourth debut novelist to win the prize. She said in an interview that she had completed the final draft of the novel in the fifth year, but later discarded it and started it from scratch. You have to give it to her since it is some risky move for a writer. The story breathes life when Patroclus, son of King Menoitius, is exiled from his own palace for killing a boy accidentally over an argument. He is sent to King Peleus’ court to be raised and trained as a soldier:
I discovered that I was not the only foster child of Peleus. The modest king turned out to be rich in cast-off sons…Afterwards we were led into the dusty sun of the practice yards for training in spear and sword. Here is where I tasted the full truth of Peleus’ kindness: well-trained and indebted, we would one day make him a fine army.
Peleus’ son Achilles, the demigod, the blessed and the cursed, befriends the sulking and shamed prince, who in turn falls in love with him. Much to his surprise, Achilles returns his affection and the two boys move against all odds that try to keep them apart, which is mostly Achilles’ mother – Thetis, a lesser goddess and a sea-nymph. Throughout the novel Achilles remains a figure of worship, beauty and mystery to Patroclus: “Then I turned to look at him. He was on his side, watching me. I had not heard him turn. I never hear him […] All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet”. But surprisingly at the same time it is Patroclus himself who reminds us that they were after all, two boys in love and Achilles – just another pawn in the dirty game played by the Greek Gods and Goddesses: “I tried to imagine him bloodied and murderous after his first raid tomorrow. ‘Are you frightened?’ I asked. ‘No’ he answered. ‘This is what I was born for’”. Another weapon merely born to kill and suffer a profane prophecy like all Greek heroes. Word spreads quickly about Helen of Sparta being abducted by Paris, son of King Priam and Prince of Troy. Both, Patroclus and Achilles are fated to go, live and die in the war that follows. Thetis sends Achilles away to a kingdom called Sycros where she marries him off secretly to Deidameia, daughter of Lycomedes , in hopes of saving her son from the prophecy of his death and partly to separate him from Patroclus as well, the mortal whom she despises more than her own mortal husband. He is forced to dress as a girl to remain hidden, but sadly for her, not from Patroclus’ eyes: “I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
We all know Patroclus must die in disguise as Achilles in order to drive him mad to the edge of the world and slaughter Hector and his pitiful Trojans like pricking a water balloon. Being obviously unaware of this, Patroclus dreads for Achilles’ life since he knows he will never return from Troy. The novel employs Patroclus as a posthumous onlooker of events after his own death, one of two things that I was extremely satisfied and emotional about. I couldn’t have imagined the rest of the story coming from someone else other than him. One of my friends suggested it should have been Odysseus, little does she know that I detest that trickster more than Dolores Umbridge. The second thing? The ending. Satisfaction of the highest order. Breathtaking and absolutely just. That sums it up right.
The portrayal of Aristos Achaion or Achilles is subverted from a grenade in Homer’s Iliad to a more or less humane hero. Madeline Miller says in her interview with Judith Starkson:
Here is a character who is the fiercest killing-machine the Greeks have. But he is also a beautiful singer, an artist of the highest order. I wanted to capture that depth in his personality: if he had not been Achilles, he might have been another Orpheus. Perhaps as an extension of that, I discovered as I wrote that there is a real innocence to Achilles. At least in my novel, he has a native generosity. This is set against his divine, self-absorbed nature, and it doesn’t always win out. But it does exist; he is never purposely cruel, and the cruelty of others often shocks him.
There are also sources which claim that Achilles is actually no better than his merciless, brutal son Neoptolemus aka Pyrrhus, if not for his lover Patroclus. I think she revealed to us an affectionate lover beneath that barbarianism and body-numbing ferity. Retellings are all about giving voice to characters who never had any, to make us see things from a different angle. Miller as a child was profoundly curious over the character of Patroclus as well; she says, the more she thought about the character of Patroclus:
the more intensely moved I was. He’s referred to in ‘The Iliad’ as gentle, and that really jumped out at me, because gentleness was not a common quality of these ancient Greek heroes. And then I thought, we’re in this culture of intense excellence, where being the best was so important, and he was OK with Achilles being the best, and being his companion and being in his shadow. That doesn’t bother him, so again, that made him extraordinary. I really thought: I want to give this amazing man his voice.
And that is precisely what she does. Patroclus’ love for Achilles is matchless. Some critics argue that the title of the novel is slightly misleading since it is The Song of Achilles and the idea of the whole novel was to represent a previously non-represented character Patroclus. But it is through his eyes we get to understand how teenage and helpless even a half-God can be. It is who Patroclus was and meant to Achilles that unleashes his fury and becomes the burning core of the knife-sharp words to dying Hector. Hector pleads to give his body back to his family when Achilles has killed him, to which he replies: “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw”. It is indeed the song sung by Patroclus that makes his dearest and other characters in the original epic appear like actual people. The novel clearly paints a picture of The Iliad of not being synonymous only with the legend of Achilles, through the point of view Patroclus, his life and his relation with warriors and other ostracized characters.
The novel intricately weaves the tale of intensity between them, and I assure you without any room for doubt, this is one of the best romance novels that I have ever read. There is this anti-war theme running throughout the novel if one chooses to see it, along with the evident exploration and celebration of one’s sexuality. There also comes, like in all Greek stories and its retellings, the dilemma of free will and destiny. The choice between war, bloodshed and peace is very conspicuous in the novel: it is peace and the power of love. We understand how Achilles and Patroclus wanted nothing to do with the war until fate demanded them to do so. What better way to acknowledge that than reading the lines uttered by Patroclus and Achilles when they learn that the latter is fated to die after Hector is killed by him. Patroclus rationally concludes after hearing the prophecy: “You must not kill Hector”. To which Achilles asks, tearing up the readers, again and again, “What has Hector ever done to me?”. Even in the end, it is not Aristos Achaion’s brave, heroic moments that serve justice to his memory but rather the lingering moments of love and life remembered by his most beloved ‘Pa-tro-clus’, the best of Myrmidons. Thetis finally realizes who her son really was: a gentle soul capable of love and warmth and not a just tool for savagery. The novel also sheds light on difficulties of single parenting and parental love, a recurring theme in Miller’s novels and novellas. Thetis, the goddess mother of Achilles, who would go to any extent to protect her son (parenting abilities can be called into questioning though, as she turns Achilles’ and Deidameia’s son Pyrrhus into an uncanny twin of Joffrey from Game of Thrones); Priam, father of Hector and King of Troy, who risks his life by entering the camp of the enemy to beg for his son’s corpse (perhaps one of the most emotional, delicate and honorable scenes in the history literature); Lycomedes, father of Deidameia, who is helpless in all ways; Chiron, the centaur, who becomes a father figure to Patroclus so much so that he uses the name Chironides, son of Chiron, to disguise himself in the court of Lycomedes. All the papa birds and mama birds trying to protect their young ones from a dreadful present or an afterlife without peace.
Miller’s prose is magnificently poetic in nature. It is simplistic and has smart usage of language which can appease readers of all age groups. The crafting of different sets of characters and the tales associated with them is quick and crisp. She has proved herself as a master storyteller who can churn out a modern text of ‘feel’ and elegancy from an ancient myth. I was introduced to her with her much awaited novel Circe last year by a friend, which is actually a retelling of The Odyssey from the point of view of the enchantress and goddess Circe. I instantly fell in love with the narrative style which has a divine quality to it. It flows like clear water lit silver by sunlight among cool rocks and gravel. I know, I am a Homer myself. The lyric quality of her work is made evident from Briseis’ initial words being described as “new leather, still and precise, not yet run together with use”. And perhaps even more by these lines which KILLED ME:
I have done it,” she says. At first, I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.
“Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”
In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
As you might guess, I am a little obsessed with this book. I recommend it to everyone who is into Greek mythology, because Madeline Miller is certainly not an author to be missed if you are. It is actually quite difficult to put into words how I feel about this book. When I try, it comes out as juicy and cliché, which is why I would like to keep it to myself and ask you folks to read it yourself. I loved it so much that I engulfed the whole novel in a couple of hours and then mourned like a child. The book sure has invited divided opinions regarding its themes, deviation from the mother text and the language employed, but I believe Miller’s ten years spent for the making of this novel turned out to be a work of tremendous success. It is a work of finesse and pure beauty, one would absolutely not regret reading it.
The English Department of Vimala college, Thrissur had organised a two-day seminar ‘La Ricerca’ on the topic ‘The Perspectives in Research‘ on 21/8/2019 and 22/8/2019. Six of us attended the seminar. The first day was scheduled with 3 sessions; the first session was presented by Dr. N. Prasantha Kumar, Professor & Head (Retd.), Department of English, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, on ‘New Perspectives in Research’. He spoke about the things that we should take into consideration while choosing a topic for research, the language to be followed, and also gave a general idea about certain theories. The next session was taken over by Dr. Muraleedharan T., Senior Faculty, Chetana College, on ‘Freedom of Cultural Studies’. The final session of the day was presented by Dr. K.J. Varghese, Associate Professor, Department of English, Christ College on ‘ELT Research: Shifting Paradigms’. His lecture was on the topics that can be chosen from the ELT field for research. It took us to new possibilities in research. Day 2 began with a talk by Dr. Mani K. P. on the topic ‘Analytical Tools for Interdisciplinary Literary Research’. In the next session, Dr C. J. Davees talked on ‘Dissertation Dynamics’. His lecture focused mainly on the technical aspects of research and PG and UG dissertations. He also made the printed version of his lecture available. The third session of the day was taken by Dr. Sijo Varghese of Achutha Menon Government College, Thrissur, on ‘Techniques and Modalities of Writing a Thesis’. He cited some of the important books and websites that could be useful for research purposes. He made his lecture more interesting with the Kahoot game at the end of the session. The final session of the seminar was by Dr. Janaky Sreedharan, Professor, Department of English, University of Calicut, on ‘Where is the Joy of Research’. In her session she shared her experiences of being a research scholar, research guide, and also added her suggestions on how to make research joyful rather than a strenuous task. At the end of each session, 15-20 minutes were devoted for discussion where we could clarify our doubts. In general, the seminar was informative and useful for us, both as PG students and as aspiring research scholars.
[Prepared by Athulya Stephen and Mufeeda K., I MA English]
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