A decade in Toronto - 20

Che

A number of global legends from diverse spheres passed on into history in 2014, among them were Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Richard Attenborough, Robin Williams. 

All of them contributed to deepening our understanding and appreciation of the arts. Marquez is unquestionably one of the best novelists of all times. 

If you’re interested in reading about what I wrote when he passed away, click here: Marquez

Similarly, Attenborough contributed to a better appreciation of Mahatma Gandhi achievements and contributions to making the world a better place. Attenborough’s Gandhi was a cinematic masterpiece and deservedly swept the Oscars in 1982 (unfortunately, Spielberg’s ET lost out). Gandhi the movie introduced the Mahatma to a global audience especially to a younger demographic. 

Che and Mahrukh

Attenborough was also a consummate actor and admired by the discerning moviegoer for his portrayal of General James Outram in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977).

Robin Williams acted in too many good movies, making it difficult to pinpoint his best. But I believe that he will be remembered for his portrayal of John Keating, the English teacher, who adopts unusual methods to teach his students' poetry and understand life better in Dead Poets Society (1989).

The list also included two individuals who were well known in their spheres and who I could claim to have known personally – Chelva Kanaganayakan and Vasu Chanchlani. Coincidentally, both passed away at a relatively young age of 62 and both were immensely active.

Vasu Chanchlani was among the most prosperous Indo-Canadians and a person deeply committed to philanthropy. His prosperity hadn’t changed his innate decency. He approached me to do a write-up on his nomination for the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award.

Che and Durga

What I found endearing about him was that he never let his wealth determine his relationships, or his identity. He’d happily accompany me to an ordinary Indian restaurant near the Chamber’s office and agreed to take turns to pay.

I got to know Chelva because of my association with the Festival of South Asian Literature and Arts. We were both members of the core group that worked to organize the festival curated by MG Vassanji and Nurjehan Aziz.

Read about him here: Chelva Kanaganayakan

With Mahrukh

Asghar Ali Engineer made a name for himself for his resolute opposition to religious fundamentalism. He passed away in 2013. As a journalist in Bombay, I’d come in close contact with him. On a couple of occasions, I’d gone over to his modest home in Santacruz East near Golibar to discuss current affairs. 

In the mid-1980s, his Centre for Study of Society and Secularism had published a report of the unstated but obvious bias against Muslims in finding jobs in the private sector. I’d taken views of a cross-section of influencers on the report. 

The best reaction had come from Datta Samant, the fiery trade union leader, famous for the textile strike of 1982. Samant looked at me quizzically when I asked him whether employers discriminated against Muslims. “They will exploit everyone. They don’t care about their workers’ religion.”

Engineer continued to be active, but we lost touch when I quit journalism in the late 1990s. 

When I went to Bombay in 2014, I made it a point to visit his Santacruz office. I took Che with me to introduce my son to the significance of a person such as Engineer and his contribution to ensuring that fundamentalism is challenged.

As a matter of principle, I have not told my son what dogma (religious/ideological) he should follow (I'll be happy if he doesn't follow any). I believe every human being has the right to choose, or better still, not choose at all. I believe that every human being has the right to not be indoctrinated, especially by family,  culture, upbringing and rigid family values. 

Where I make an exception is to tell him to be on the side of the oppressed. Engineer and his kind always stood (and stand) with the oppressed.

Unfortunately or fortunately, Che doesn’t remember that we visited Engineer’s office and met his son Irfan Engineer who has continued to do all the good work that his father initiated, and in his efforts, he’s been joined by Ram Puniyani, a former IIT professor, who even during his teaching days, was a resolute activist fighting the good cause of secularism.

Read about Asghar Ali Engineer here: Striving for Peace and Harmony

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My journey to discover authors and poets continued and I assisted  Meenakshi Alimchandani in organizing the South Asian component of the first (and last) Inspire Toronto International Book Fair. It was a great event, where the who’s who of Toronto’s literary world congregated to discuss what they know best – reading, writing, and books.

Meenakshi had her favourite South Asian authors for the panel discussion and included friends such as Jasmine D’Costa, Manjushree Thapa, Anirudh Bhattacharya, and the effervescent Pricilla Uppal, who succumbed to cancer earlier this year. 

Read about it here: Inspire

My friends Yoko Morgenstern and Joyce Wayne published their debut novels in 2014. Yoko’s Double Exile was released in July when I’d left for India. Joyce’s The Cook’s Temptation was launched at our common friend Sang Kim’s restaurant Wind-Up Bird Café (named after Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Joyce’s second novel, Last Night of the World (published in 2018) is one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

With Yoko

Read their interviews:

Yoko Morgenstern

Joyce Wayne

For a brief while, Sang’s restaurant became a hotspot for literary dos and attracted an esoteric group of people all of whom shared their love for great food and great books. Sang, an award-winning author, is these days pursuing his passion for creating exquisite cuisines. 

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Except the last photo with Yoko, the other photos are not connected to the blog. I've just placed them here because they were clicked in 2014, and Che looks smart in them.

A decade in Toronto – 6

2009 was our first new year in Toronto and it began with a lot of promise. I started my program in journalism at the Sheridan College in Oakville. I was returning to school after a gap of over 25 years. The journalism class comprised students who were just like me – practising or former journalists from across the world who were trying to get a toehold in the profession in Canada.

It was ironic that after nearly two decades in journalism, both as a working journalist and as a teacher, I was returning to journalism as a student. But I was keen to learn and unlearn. The Sheridan college campus at Oakville was as impressive as any that I’d seen or imagined, and the most interesting part of it all was the daily commute from Toronto to Oakville on the GO train.

With Yoko, Nelson and Mike at Sheridan

The class comprised students from South America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Japan, and Africa - an interesting bunch of highly talented individuals, who were extremely independent-minded and like most journalists were not natural team players. 

Some became great friends during the duration of the course of the program. Yoko Morgenstern and Nelson Alvarado Jourde are friends I dearly miss.  Yoko is in Germany and visits Toronto infrequently, Nelson is back in Peru, and I haven’t met him in years.

With Yoko, Nelson, Mike and Joyce Wayne

The teachers were all equally interesting; Teenaz Javat is now a friend. She is a Bombayite who has had the privilege of working as a journalist in India and Pakistan. I have fond memories of Patricia Bradbury. She made the classroom come alive with her engaging, animated teaching. She also introduced us to Katherine Govier, the renowned and accomplished author, and now an activist for swifter, seamless integration of immigrants into the Canadian mainstream.

Of course, the hero of the program was Joyce Wayne, the program coordinator of the Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Journalists. A veteran professor, extremely well-read, a true heart liberal, with a permanent glint of mischief in her eyes, Joyce propelled the program to great heights and constantly challenged its participants to strive to do better.  One of my regrets (and I have many) was not to have done English literature at the university. With Joyce at Sheridan, I finally found a mentor who was as interested in literature as I am.

It was an evening program, so I had to change my shift timing and I returned to the night shift at the condo. After a while the hectic schedule became strenuous, and by April 2009, it was impossible for me to get enough sleep during the day, go to Sheridan in the evening, and then do the night shift at the condo. On a couple of occasions, the patrol who roamed around in a vehicle at night caught me napping.  I decided to quit my job as a security guard.

I was confident that at the end of the Sheridan program, I’d at least get an internship placement somewhere. A major lacuna in the Sheridan program was the absence of a design component. To complete that gap, I joined the Yorkdale Adult Learning Centre’s web designing program; a free program meant for newcomers.  It was an enriching experience. I was now spending several hours at a high school had both eager adult newcomer students and regular school students who were my son’s age.  

Yorkdale group

At Yorkdale, I met a bunch of fun-loving group of Latinos from South America. The classroom had students of all ages and from everywhere – Africa, South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe – all of us sharing a sort of desperation: of getting a proper job. I wrote about my encounter with two religiously devout fellow students.  Click here to read: Question of identity.

Around the same time, I also joined a memoir writing workshop conducted by Allyson Latta at the North York branch of the Toronto public library. After quitting my security guard job, I had the entire day free for myself. Latta’s class was a perfect fit for me; the sessions taught me to look inside myself for stories. Click here to read about Latta’s memoir writing sessions: Allyson Latta.

When Che turned 12, Mahrukh began working at a telemarketing company but was inexplicably laid off, despite doing well. Then, she worked as a data entry operator but the two-people company, operating from a basement on Dufferin and Lawrence disappeared when it was time to pay wages. She was singularly unfortunate in getting steady, sustainable employment; it caused her immense frustration, but she remained cheerful despite the adverse circumstances.

We didn’t let these reversals deter us from exploring our neighbourhoods. On weekends, we’d get into the GO bus or the GO train and go to different towns near Toronto. Even when we were still to know the lay of the land, we did an open-top bus ride in Toronto, within a month of our arrival. On my first birthday in Toronto, we went to the Niagara Falls; it was all that we thought it’d be, and then some.  The most memorable part of our trip: The butterfly garden; we’d never seen anything as exotic and exciting as this garden.  

For me, there can be nothing more exciting than riding the streetcars in the rains. We’ve done the Queen Street streetcar ride more frequently than we’d care to remember – all the way from Long Branch to Neville Park. That year (2009) we went to our first Toronto Auto Show and continued doing so for the next few years. 

When I recall the number of road trips that we did in our early years, the one that stays etched in my mind is the one to Stouffville, ON, to take rides on the model trains.  Click here to read about it: Day trip. Some years later, the federal government used extracts from this blog in its booklet for newcomers.

I was increasingly veering towards writing and started working on freelance assignments for the Canadian Immigrant and the New Canadian magazines. I had also begun work on improving and updating my short story that I’d written in December.  In May 2009, I sent the short story to Diaspora Dialogues, a Toronto not-for-profit that promotes creative expressions in diverse people. This simple act of courage (courage because rejections can be depressing) was to change my life.

A writer must follow inner criteria: Yoko Morgenstern

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Q & A with Yoko Morgenstern, author, translator 

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Yoko's novel Double Exile, published by Red Giant Books, will be released on July 22 at The Japan Foundation, Toronto

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            Q. Your novel is unique in many ways because it walks along a precarious razor's edge by attempting to portray the helplessness of most Germans under the Nazi regime, and the fact that they had little choice but to support the regime. What inspired you to adopt such a bold theme?

A. It is based on my bachelor’s thesis. When I learned about Carossa, I strongly felt that his story had to be told. Not because he was a heroic person, but rather opposite.  He was an unfortunate combination of social responsibility and a passive personality. As Ayumi expresses in the novel, I couldn’t feel for him at first, and it was a challenge for me as a novelist to imagine and understand someone else’s life under an extreme circumstance.

Q. Your background is unique in the sense that you combine the sensibilities of three distinctive cultures - Asian (Japanese), European (German) and North American (Canadian). All these cultures find a reflection in your maiden novel. Would it be right to say that your personality has now become a confluence of all these three cultures and that no culture predominates?

A. Not really. As I age, I feel my Japanese identity more than anything else. This is also due to my engagement in translation of Katherine Govier’s novel past years, which is set in the 19th century Japan, and so I was deeply absorbed in its history, culture and language. But this can change from time to time. When living in Canada I developed somewhat of a Canadian identity. Although I’ve spent more than a decade in Germany, I never feel German identity or sense of belonging or whatsoever.

Q. You've worked on the manuscript for a long time, in addition to your own hard work, who and what helped you the most in the writing of your maiden novel.

A. I was fortunate to have a chance to learn fiction writing from Katherine Govier on a one-on-one basis. I also learned a lot every time I had something edited by native English speakers, but on the other hand, it could be confusing because sometimes every native speaker says different things, maybe you know that yourself. So I think it’s important for a writer, regardless of what language you use, to have inner criteria to follow.

And of course, reading feeds your writing. When I encounter striking words, phrases and sentences I write them down, which I have never done with my own language. Writing in someone else’s language makes you humble.

The last and most important thing is to have supportive friends, regardless of writer or non-writer. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to make it all this way.  

Q. You have written several powerful short stories, when you plan to publish a collection of short stories.

A. Yes, this has been on the top of my to-do list for a long time, but I just haven’t had a chance to complete it so far. I’ve been having a crazy couple of months - three books to publish in one season. It’s exciting, but also exhausting. I sort of miss quietness in which I can concentrate on creation.  Once things calm down, I’m going to write the rest of the stories.

Double Exile - Yoko Morgenstern

Yoko Morgenstern’s sensitive exploration of art and political responsibility, of internal and external perspectives on times of crisis, and of the interconnectedness of and analogies between different (national) histories is stunning and makes Double Exile an essential contribution to the literary landscape of the new millennium.

-- Maria Löschnigg, Professor of English and Canadian Literature, University of Graz, Austria

Y

oko Morgenstern is originally from Tokyo. She started creative writing while she was living in Canada. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Montreal Review, The Globe and Mail, Salon II, and The Great Lakes Review, among others. Her Japanese translation of The Printmaker’s Daughter by the Canadian novelist Katherine Govier was published in Tokyo in June 2014.

Yoko learned English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. She took two ESL courses from 1997 to 1998, Academic Writing in 2008, and also participated in the U of T Summer Writing School in 2008.

She received a BA in Political Science from the University of Tsukuba, and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Journalism from Sheridan College. Currently she is at work on an MA in English and American Literature at the University of Bamberg.

Double Exile is Yoko’s debut novel. It is a story centering on a young woman’s travels to Germany, in hopes of obtaining the necessary information she needs to complete her thesis.

Ayumi has left her family and friends in Japan, and is on a mission to uncover as much as she can about the trials and tribulations of the German writer Hans Carossa. 

During the Nazi occupation, Hans refused to leave Germany as he did not wish to become an exile. Ayumi is hoping to dig up all of the facts concerning Hans, and finally get to the bottom of why he was labelled a controversial figure in history.

During her research, Ayumi encounters Alex, an old man who claims to have personally known Hans. Believing that she has hit a gold mine, Ayumi devotes the rest of her stay in Germany to Alex. As she unravels the harrowing truths surrounding Hans, the narrative is drawn into the past where Hans narrates his own story.

Interweaving the past and present, Ayumi struggles to not only understand Hans’ role in the war, but her own misguided reasons for coming to Germany. As Alex and Ayumi grow closer, Ayumi soon unearths several shocking truths that force her to not only reassess her own relationship with Alex but ultimately, her own relationship with her past and also the dark side of Japanese history.

As for the Canadian/American context; Hans and his Jewish friend in Canada correspond by using underground mail service. The model of this character is a Toronto-based Jewish journalist who is a survivor of Nazi Germany as well as the imprisonment by the Canadian government.

Yoko’s novel has earned serious praise from all quarters. Katherine Govier, novelist and a passionate multiculturalism activist, observes, “Double Exile is a compact and moving tale that sheds light on the political choices made by those writers who stayed home in Nazi Germany. Morgenstern’s straightforward, clean style lets the story tell itself. Ayomi, backpacker from Tokyo, comes alive with her honest drive to understand betrayal and loyalty --in their lives and her own. Yoko Morgenstern is a debut novelist unafraid of complex questions, and gifted with the simple touch.”

Says Laura Lush, a poet and writer, “Many have written about the rise of Nazi Germany and the indelible mark it has left in history. But none has told the story of the plight of the German Jewish writers so well as Yoko Morgenstern has in Double Exile.  In a trifecta of countries, time, and cultures, Morgenstern weaves a spellbinding psychological drama that innocently begins when a graduate student from Japan comes to Germany to search out the story of Hans Carossa, one of Germany’s greatest but seemingly most forgotten modernist writers. In prose that brims with intelligence and humanity, Morgenstern shows how Carossa and his contemporaries struggle with their decision to stay or flee Nazi Germany, a decision that results in equally unfavourable fates—accusations of pro-Nazi alliances if they stay or internment in countries such as Canada if they leave.” 

Yoko's debut novel is being launched in Toronto on July 22 at the Japan Foundation, Toronto. Click here for details: Double Exile Book Release

Bleeding Light

Sheniz Janmohamed

Earlier this month I attended the annual book launch of TSAR. This year, I knew a few more people than last year. This was my second year and as last year, I was again in the midst of innumerable writers.


My friend Dawn Promislow read from her collection Jewels and Other Stories, Ava Homa read a passage from Glass Slippers, probably the best story in her collection Echoes from the Other Land, Sheniz Janmohamed read from her book of ghazals and H Nigel Thomas read an extract from his novel Lives: Whole and Otherwise.

This blog is about Sheniz Janmohamed’s book of ghazals Bleeding Light.

The ghazal is a unique concept in poetry where the singer is as important as (or perhaps more important than) the poet. This amazing confluence of words and music makes ghazals not merely a pleasant experience, but a transcendental, even spiritual one.

Two of the best contemporary ghazal singers are Jagjit Singh and Ghulam Ali and the best ghazals they have sung are:

Jagjit Singh: Tum ko dekh to (poet: Javed Akhtar)
Ghulam Ali: Hangama hai (poet: Akbar Allahabadi).

I had never read ghazals in English before and quite frankly, it took some getting used to and re-readings before I began to enjoy Sheniz’s ghazals. All the ghazals are refreshing and make you see the world differently. Once the light touches your soul, you can’t remain unmoved.

Here’s one that I liked the most because it evokes so many images.


In Crimson


A man sells packets of socks in a gully where most men walk barefoot.
What can he do but rest his head on that ledge, hastily painted crimson?

In Old Town, Allah hu Akbar pounds the walls of crumbling Fort Jesus.
A taxi cuts us off, Allah is Great plastered on his window – in crimson.

At the Coast, we bargain shillings for bags and kisii stone elephants.
Indians are not good customers. The seller brands our skin crimson.

Bombs detonate at the steps of every mosque, in the throat of every believer.
If Allah is a war cry, how can we lift Bismillah from asphalt stained crimson.


If only we planted a thousand trees for each page we discard and crumple.
When her last pen snaps, Israh will draw blood and scrawl words in crimson.


Israh is Sheniz’s takhallus
Image: http://www.philosufi.com/blog/2010/11/sheniz-janmohamed.html

Jewels & other stories

A few months after I started this blog, I discovered that it’s easier to write about book launches than to write about books.

To write about books, you've got to read them. Reading requires time and patience. I don’t have either.

Moreover, writing about the books is fraught with awkward situations, especially when you know the writers.

Attending book launches and writing about them is  easier. Of course, I realise that nobody’s fooled into believing that I read all the books I write about.

The launch of Dawn Promislow’s Jewels & Other Stories was just about the most sensational book launches I’ve attended in a long time. 

Type Books at Queen Street W, the venue for the event, was packed. 

• Nurjehan Aziz was there. Aziz’s TSAR Publications has published Dawn’s book. 
• My mentor MG Vassanji was there. It’s always an honour to meet and talk to him. 
• Most my writer friends were there – Yoko Morgenstern, Joyce Wayne, Michael Fraser, and Leslie Shimotakahara.
• Antanas Sileika of Humber School for Writers and Olive Senior, poet, writer and Dawn’s mentor were there, too, along with probably many others whom I don't know. 

Dawn explained why she wrote these stories, read a passage from her book and answered a few questions.

To read Dawn’s interview on Open Book Toronto click here: Dawn's Interview.

I hope everyone who was there bought a copy of the book. 

For those who couldn’t attend or couldn’t buy, here’s your chance to do so. Click on this link: Jewels & Other Stories. 

Image: http://dd.maytree.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=301&Itemid=30

Creativity has many voices

Canadian Voices II has a hundred pieces of creativity – short stories and poems.

As with any collection, some are strikingly good to read.

I haven’t finished reading the collection yet. Of what I have read, the following short stories stand out for giving me that “aa..haa!” moment.

Chester & Grace by Cassie McDaniel
A Black Snowball by Braz Menezes
A Blue Fish by Yoko Morgenstern
The Devil’s Stone Cook by Joyce Wayne

And among the poems, these are the better ones:

Instructions by Elizabeth Barnes
The Great Depression by Jasmine D’Costa
On Un-making Contact by Deena Kara Shaffer
Apology by Sarah Zahid
&
I, Too, Am Canadian by Jasmine Jackson which ends with these memorable lines:

So please do not take my accent or the darker hue of my skin
For mistaking me to be any less Canadian

Publishers:
Bookland Press, Toronto 6021 Yonge Street, Suite 1010, Toronto ON M2M 3W2 Tel: (800) 535-1774, Website: http://www.booklandpress.com/, E-mail: books@booklandpress.com
ISBN: 978-0-9784395-8-3, 360 pages, $25.95

Images: Jasmine: http://www.bhasvic.ac.uk/student_life/press/press_10.htm

Coming Soon: Canadian Voices Volume II

The Settler's Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food

I’ve no compunctions in admitting that my ignorance of contemporary writers is monumental.

I had not heard Yasmin Alibhai-Brown or her masterpiece of a book. The Settler’s Cookbook – A Memoir of Love, Migration & Food that was published last year to wide acclaim in Britain.

House of Anansi Press Inc., the distributors of Portobello books in Canada, has brought the paperback edition of this genre-bending memoir and a cookbook rolled into one.

Thanks to my friend Yoko Morgenstern, I’m reading it right now. Quite simply, it’s an amazing book.  I haven’t finished reading it yet so it would be improper to review it. I'm sure nobody would mind if I comment on it.

You can also read it as a recipe book. Although that wouldn’t be half as interesting as reading the book as it’s written – memoir interspersed with recipes. Yasmin weaves the recipes into the story of her life. She does this assuredly and with dexterity.

When you begin to read the recipe, you can’t help but reminisce about your own past. A past that in my case is now a swiftly fading memory.

I had tears welling up as I read the recipes for rotlo, halwa, stuffed brinjals, shrikhand, dudhpak, lemon chilli and ginger pickle, moong dal bhajia, masala chai, chevro, khari puri, nan katai, sev, urad dal, sak dhokri...

Any Gujarati would feel the same way.

Reading these recipes transported me back into time and place when (in a world that somehow felt more secure than now), my mother and my Ba cooked for us – my sister and I – adding dollops of affection to their considerable culinary skills.  They could make everyday home food taste better than restaurant food.

Yasmin’s book has several finger-licking non-vegetarian recipes. I've only listed the vegetarian dishes because of my largely vegetarian upbringing. 


It’s been a while since I’ve had traditional Gujarati food. Let me hasten to add here, that to Mahrukh’s credit, despite being a non-Gujarati and a Muslim, her urad dal is as good as my Ba’s.

Yasmin’s memoirs are important in the context of Diaspora writing because the stories are about real people and about their despair at being uprooted from a land that they never quite considered home and yet didn’t know of any other place they could call so.

The story of Yasmin’s family is as compelling as Salim’s story in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.

There is a sizeable Gujarati speaking population in Canada of first generation immigrants from East Africa (including the Ismailis, Yasmin’s community) who will identify with many situations that Yasmin describes in her book. In fact, all Gujaratis will enjoy the book. 

However, that would be an unfair summation of the book’s appeal. The book effortlessly transcends geographical boundaries and ethnic classifications.

Moreover, The Settler’s Cookbook portrays seemingly commonplace situations in a devastatingly deadpan style.

Sample this:  “Fatima, nearly ninety, remembered her deprivation and struggle: ‘Mosquitoes used to bite us everywhere and make us sick. My parents, you know making more children on the gunny sacks in the shop and it was not very good behaviour. My father made a lot of noise and my mother’s voice was like a lost kitten. She died when baby number fourteen got stuck. Good, she was free after that.”

Let me leave you with a recipe that you should have this Sunday afternoon...

Masala Chai (The Gujarati tea)

Teabags, one per person

Sugar to taste

Water with milk – 2/3rd to 1/3rd

A little cinnamon, cardamom and a pinch of clove powder or ready-made tea masala you can buy in Asian shops

• Boil the milk and water in a saucepan, then add all other ingredients
•  Let the liquid boil up one more time
• Serve in feminine cups, not blokey mugs; never tastes right in those

Image: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/images/1846270839/ref=dp_image_0/188-1445156-9531357?ie=UTF8&n=916520&s=books

The Wayfinders

It’s always nice to meet friends after a gap. Yesterday was no exception. Yoko Morgenstern and Nelson Alvarado Jourde are two individuals I met in January this year.

I admire and respect them.

Yesterday we met at the book launch event of 2009 CBC Massey Lectures.

Briefly, the Massey Lectures – started in 1961 and named after Vincent Massey, Canada’s Governor General – is an annual event.

A Canadian or an international scholar gives a series of lectures across Canada on a political, cultural or a philosophical subject. The lecture is based on a book.

Last year, Margaret Atwood surprised the world by her prescient Payback that anticipated the global economic recession.

The lecture series is a joint venture between CBC, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto.

Wade Davis will be giving the Massey Lectures this year. Davis is an anthropologist, ethnobationst, filmmaker and photographer.

He looks like Bjorn Borg, the tennis ace of my era.

His book – The Wayfinders – analyses the extinction of human cultures. The back cover of the book says, “...anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today will disappear within our lifetimes. And languages are merely the canaries in the coal mine: what of the knowledge, stories, songs, and the way of seeing encoded in these voices?”

So far I’ve merely browsed through the first chapter of the book. But I'll read any book that begins with a quotation from the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi.

Illustrating the hijacking of anthropology by the apologists of the British Raj, Davis writes, “As naturalists throughout the nineteenth century attempted to classify creation even as they coped with the revelations of Darwin, anthropologists became servants of the Crown, agents dispatched to the far reaches of empire with the task of understanding strange tribal peoples and cultures that they might properly be administered and controlled...It followed with the certainty of Victorian rectitude that advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to civilize the savage, a moral duty that again played well into the needs of empire. ‘We happen to be the best people in the world,’ Cecil Rhodes famously said, ‘and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.’ George Nathaniel Curzon, eleventh viceroy of India, agreed. ‘There has never been anything,’ he wrote, ‘so great in the world’s history as the British Empire, so great an instrument for the good of humanity. We must devote all of our energies and our lives to maintaining it.’ Asked why there was not a single Indian native employed in the Government of India, he replied, ‘Because among all 300 million people of the subcontinent, there was not a single man capable of the job.’"

Curzon, incidentally, is the viceroy who divided Bengal into West and East Bengal. The Indian nationalist coined the phrase ‘Divide and Rule’ that sort of epitomised British colonialism everywhere in the world.

Image: http://images.ted.com/images/ted/1306_254x191.jpg