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Book Name:So Far by Gerson Da Cunha Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 150

OF DISTANCE AND SLOW TIME

The man's in advertising. That said a kind of malaise enters the proceedings since the intellectual Mafia is notoriously unkind to advertising men. Opinion is divided on whether they are creative thinkers or bourgeois capitalists who'll sell their mothers. Though the balance depends on who you happen to be conversing with since obviously each set of Mafia is distinguished by its own intellectual viewpoint. To hear the teachers speak you would think that the greatest sin was creative writing. After all, what more is there to say when Shakespeare and T S Eliot are done - recently they have, per force had to admit Arundhuti Roy into their ranks of the acknowledged if they want to retain their status. But advertising men? No, no, no chance at all - and it has nothing to do with the obscene amounts of money that they take home and their glamorous jetsetting lifestyles, all of which go to contribute to their soul-destroyingly commercial attitude.

The advertising and corporate mafia, on the other hand will talk about the unstable creative temperament that plagues ad men. These are the prima donnas of the world, they say, carrying a burden of genius with them - burden that has to be alleviated by strange flashy clothes, alcohol. All this is permissible in pursuit of that elusive dream, the big idea. As Marshal McLuhan says, advertising is the true history of our times. So ad men are talked about and turn their noses down at the rest of the world, acknowledging Shakespeare as the greatest copywriter that ever lived and the best source of ad lines next only to the King James Bible. So Andy Warhol does a take off on ads and gets away with it, glamorises a Chanel No 5 bottle and Maurice Saatchi is talked about and marries a writer fabled for her Jacobean novels.

This debate reaches heated heights in India where the intellectual mafia has a smaller canvas in which to justify its existence. In the marble mansions of Malabar Hills where they will tell you that the Indian ad world is beginning to make its mark on the larger ad world, as Indian writing in English has slowly but surely made its mark on English literature. Mumbai is India's Hollywood, Paris and Madison Avenue, everything rolled into one. There, pronouncements are handed down and accepted with awe by the rest of the country. Mumbai is where anything important in India is, sophistication, culture, true cosmopolitan feeling. Delhi's crass, violent and political, Bangalore lax, Madras dull and Calcutta stagnating. In Bombay reputations are made and lost without the rest of the country even being aware of it.

Among the ad mafia, ad men who venture off the beaten track are praised for developing the scope of their talent. Alyque Padamsee who headed Lintas went into theatre and directed a notable series of plays, including Othello, until he retired from Lintas and with it seemed to lose his inspiration altogether. Advertising is supposed to fuel the creative wellsprings - Imitiaz Dharkar is another poet with ad film roots. Not that this a point of view that would find much favour among the hard core university men and women.

Writing poetry in English has been a small and very private obsession in India. Most Indian poets have struggled to find outlets in slim volumes published by private presses like Writers Workshop, poetry magazines have been born and died. Chandrabhaga, edited by the Oriya poet Sitakant Mahapatra is just enjoying a new incarnation, its fourth. Vikram Seth made it all right to be effusive in verse, though he launched the cause of a thousand bad iambs.

Every Indian gentleman has a poetic soul - it has been in the ethos of the nation since Vatsayana stipulated it as one of the civilised arts in the Kama Sutra. Public poetry readings were more generally common 10 years ago than they are now - now they are the provinces of the celebrity, the Vikram Seth or Amit Chaudhury who comes with a foreign label or a legend attached. Gerson da Cunha is an ad man who casts a long shadow. He went from advertising to running an office and making a name in the ad world until he suddenly tired of the unending game and took off at a tangent. He went to Latin America and New York while he was working with the United Nations on behalf of UNICEF. These are things that your ordinary ad man will not do, while avowing his intellectual soul.

So far is a chronicle of wanderings. A little like the kind of thing Octavio Paz used to do in his diplomat days. Small portraits of countries and people that add up to an internal dialogue on why things happen the way they happen. On what makes life the incomprehensible mystery it is. On how death makes nonsense of life. The only thing that holds the poems together is the fact of them being incidents in Da Cunha’s life. Ad men have always written poetry in one form or the other - usually in jingles. Da Cunha's poetry does not use meaningless rhymes for the sake of cheap music, however potent that may be for the soul. Nothing about his poems breathes advertising - which is something one would expect from a once high profile Indian ad man.

Sensitive men see things and put them together in the odd felicities of the imagination. They call it lateral thinking when they choose to pull it out of the morass of ad jargon. Lateral thinking is good for the creative mind - it encourages a fresh approach to the BIG IDEA. It tells you how to sell things better. Poets have been lateral thinking for years and in the metaphor, in the unexpected juxtaposition of images lies the magic. But this is a hard gift because not all juxtapositions are felicitous, bright-thighed youth on roller skates can jar. Or even the jalebis compared to ‘silken dancers on oil’.

Da Cunha is new to the gift and reticent about it - the ad world certainly had no idea that he ever wrote poetry, even though he did start his career on the creative side. Dom Moraes, himself a poet has said in his foreword that the poetry is as good as some of the best verse being published in English today. The best thing about Da Cunha’s poetry is that shy gift, his reticence.

Book Name:Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 250

THE MISSIONARY POSITION

Ever since Sir Richard Burton translated the Kamasutra into English, the west has fallen on it either with cries of, ‘Shame!’ or, ‘Liberation!’ It came like a breath of fresh air into narrow repressed Victorian England where the fact that a piano had legs couldn’t be mentioned for fear of provoking impure passions in the listener. Things were carried to even stranger lengths in America, because there, books by male and female writers couldn’t even be kept on the same shelf.

So scholars took to this new freedom masquerading as a scholarly exercise in Sanskrit. They studied the classical Indian way of life as described in Vatsayana’s pages in intimate detail. After a while, the Kamasutra became a kind of battle cry because all personal problems were put down to sexual incompatibility.

Oddly enough, while this was happening in the West, in India most people were quietly trying to pretend that all these things were ‘against Indian culture’. The influence of the Raj had begun to take a late deadly effect there. The Kamasutra went underground, to be placed on the same level as the plaster-of-paris pornographic plaques sold in the backstreets of Khajuraho. The erotic sculptures of Khajuraho had nothing to do with the body, India declared - it was all about spirituality and the soul’s unity with God.

The Kamasutra has everything to do with better sex, the West declared and the jetsetters and their playmates began experimenting with the more complicated positions. Indian advertising, however, launched kamasutra condoms some time ago, to much media hype and debate about whether the name could be applied to a condom. Now it’s simply known as KS and features a steamy ad film - well, as steamy as Indian ad films get with blue tones and lots of water.

Which is where we get to Lee Siegel’s book. Love in a Dead Language is about a professor whose life is dedicated to a study of the teachings of the Kamasutra. He is a one-book academic - his courses are based on the Kamasutra and Vatsayana’s use of Sanskrit.

Dr Roth’s obsession with the Kamasutra is matched only by his obsession with India. The son of a Hollywood actor, his life has been filled with sultry Indian sirens, beginning with an actress who came over to act with his father and who ended up murdering the director in a steamy crime of passion.

"[A] Whimsical farce . . .. While inserts and footnotes heighten the absurdity (the book is dense with cartoons, Hollywood memorabilia, news clips, and 19th century travelogues), Siegel's criticisms of orientalization and exoticism are serious. . . . While this ribald romp, satire on Westerners' spiritual hunger, and send up of academia may prove too rarefied and serpentine for some tastes, others will find it a sophisticated treat." Actually the book has something of the whimsy of Tristram Shandy about it. Somewhere around the end you’re forced to turn it upside down to read the text - of course you’re offered the option of skipping what you can’t read upside down - but then it’s all about seducing younger women and maintaining mistresses and wives so you do turn the book upside down.

Dr Roth has a young mistress who starts out by being in love with a basketball player. She’s the young daughter of an Indian gynaecologist, who has never been to India and hates all things Indian. And he has the ideal wife whom he meets after various encounters with other women. His Sophia, he feels is the ideal wife - until one glance from Lalita’s dark eyes shatters his composure.

The path of his seduction is charted, of course, through the realms of the Kamasutra . He follows what has been prescribed in the pages right down to the last fullstop. And his student, annotating the book, adds the footnotes which sometimes run on for pages, in a classic send up of American academics.

What you do realise, of course, is that Lee Siegel is having fun at the expense of all those academics who spend their careers mastering just one book. They write papers on it, present lectures and organise lecture tours, all with suitable solemnity, blind to the fact that their lives are just following one path. Nothing exists for them outside their obsession. Nothing exists for Dr Roth either, but in his case the obsession turns out to be sex incarnate which makes the very nature of it suspect. And to complicate matters even further, Lalita the mistress takes up with a Peace Corps volunteer called Rothberg, so that the play on Dr Roth’s name is continued. Lalita finds peace with the Peace Corps man after Dr Roth’s inexplicable death - too many sneezes, sneezing and sex have their similarities after all, both are strong urges! Lee Siegel himself is a rival academic in the book - someone encountered and disliked by Dr Roth and his student.

If you’re semi-serious the book’s a quick refresher course on the contents of the Kamasutra and the love lives of various Orientalists who found themselves seduced by the East in more ways than one. If you’re not serious, then you might be irritated by the footnotes and the gimmicks - because the book is an intellectual gimmick - and it’s hard to read as a straight story because the writer’s having so much fun writing it. The book’s for the clever and the somewhat perverted. People who like their pleasures a little twisted. Yes, perhaps there’s something serious there when Roth’s student observes that there is a love that the Kamasutra has not guessed at - that life is not all about sexual politics - but the book is not about the seriousness of sex or love.

The faithful Sophia mourns her husband and moves on. Lalita finds a husband and Dr Roth’s student finds an intellectual orgasm of sorts in annotating his master’s book. So all in all you could say that it was a great gang bang while it lasted. Or you could sit back politely and talk about Richard Stern and all those other English eccentrics who write out of the way books as a result of an ‘Affliktion of their Humour’.

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