Photo by Joao

In a quick glance, turning away or towards, a question arises: is that the neck of a woman or the stalk of a hibiscus?

This interesting article on the Ladder that organizes labor by nationality in the London job market brought back to my mind a few interesting discussions I have had with a doctor friend who felt it was beneath his self respect to sign up to work for the British NHS.

His stories basically boiled to this: however long and hard you may work over there, if you are brown and foreign to boot, you will be stuck to doing scut work. No doubt scut work in Vilayat pays more generously than back in the Desh but essentially your circle of multicultural hell or paradise has been pre-chosen for you. Given this, he claimed that things are significantly better for FMGs (foreign medical graduates) here in USA - a claim that is qualified by Abraham Verghese in his autobiographical books as an Indian doctor making his way in America by essentially saying, "yes, provided you are willing to work in the rural outposts (and thus undesirable locations for the natives) such as Johnson City, Tennessee in his case.

In this context, I must also mention and recommend "Dirty Pretty Things"; an excellent movie starring Audrey Tautou of Amelie fame, dealing with the conditions and lives of 'illegal aliens' (to use the US terminology) caught in this modern day Dickensian London market.

A comment I made at Chandrahas' excellent literary blog 'The Middle Stage'

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Chandrahas,

I had read some of the reviews and essays you have mentioned in this post right about when they came out, notably the ones on R.K. Narayan in NYRB and the Indian era of Soviet books. And Shama above has already aired the beef I have with Mishra's writing, both in style and content.

It seems to me that a sense of "Looke here, I have such a delicate James-ian sensibility even though I have had a screwed up mofussil youth in India", seems to infect both of his books, as well as a number of his reviews. I also think he sets up false dichotomies such as those between the provincials and the cosmopolitans, and flogs these for what they are worth. I admit I enjoyed reading his novel 'The Romantics', but found it tiresome when most of the subject matter of this novel was regurgitated in his latter book on, which is really not a book on, Buddha. Who gives a s**t if Mr. Mishra spent years in Mashobra brooding about Buddha, and fashioning himself into a public intellectual who will live a life of the mind? I certainly don’t.

Finally, his review of Virkam Seth's "Two Lives" in the NYT Book Review made me stab the newspaper with my letter opener. If Mishra wanted to write an essay on Hitler and British India he should have done so separately instead of flogging these 'ideas' out of place in a review on a memoir of, well, two lives. And in the process of deploying all this hot air, he forgets to tell the reader if he actually liked reading the book or not, and his qualified recommendations to the potential readers - cardinal sins by a reviewer IMHO.