A Good Read

I just read a post on Puss Reboots about the kind of books the author likes and it made me think of what kind of books I myself enjoy. The first thing I realised, much to my embarrassment, is that I haven’t been reading very many non-legal books recently. When I do read though, these are the factors which influence what I pick up (in brief):

1. I like books which are easy to read like ‘The MouseDriver Chronicles’ by John Lusk and Kyle Harrison. I don’t like ‘high brow’ books which take me ages to understand; if I wanted to read books which were virtually incomprehensible, I’d stick to reading standard legal texts.
2. Human rights interest me and I read a large number of books related to them but, even here, I’d much rather read books like ‘The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade’ by Victor Malarek which are well-written and accessible rather than academic papers. In addition to this, I read books which tell personal stories such as ‘The Stoning of Soraya M.’ by Freidoune Sahebjam and ‘Prisoner of Tehran’ by Marina Nemat. 
3. I usually enjoy books which are classified as literary fiction such as ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro which I fell in love with.
4. Large doses of slang usually turn me off and I don’t enjoy having to read about someone who swears all the time unless the author has something interesting to say or needs to use such language because of the plot as Martina Cole does in her books.
5. Soppy, sentimental books are sometimes just what I need after a long day. I love simply being able to stop thinking. I don’t particularly enjoy entirely predictable romantic books. I enjoy books like ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ by Philippa Gregory. 
6. If it’s pulp fiction, I’d rather stay away from books in which the nicest characters die (as they often seem to do in Arthur Hailey’s books): if that’s what I wanted to read about, I’d pick up a newspaper.
7. Anything that makes me laugh is a good read as far as I’m concerned.
8. I find it difficult to relate to science fiction and rarely read it.
9. Long descriptions bore me. No matter how good an author is, I don’t want to have to read through a three-page description of how furniture is arranged in a room.
10. I require books to make me feel something, anything.

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“If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”
--- Sloane Crosley

I've always believed that you can learn everything you need to know about a person by looking at their bookshelf. The problem with that though is that (a) they may not read at all and (b) even if they do read, they may not buy books because they're on a pro-environment paper-saving binge, because they can't afford them or because they're miserly.

I read about people deciding whether to spend time on a relationship because of the other person's taste in books the other day. As I read the write-up, it seemed a little far-fetched to me but a few minutes ago, I began to think of it after I almost unsubscribed from a blog which reviewed a novel which I'd like to read called 'The Palace of Illusions' by Chitra Divakaruni by saying that although it's 'not as good or as strong as Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’, it’s still very much worth reading'.

Judging people by their taste in books isn't something I thought I did, but when I read that sentence, I almost unsubscribed from the blog. Dan Brown. Strong?

I've enjoyed reading Dan Brown's books but his writing is hardly great literature. If it weren't for the subjects he's chosen, I'm sure he'd be just another novelist in the list: John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer, Arthur Hailey, Stephen King.

Thinking about it, I realise that if someone told me that their favourite author was someone I didn't think too highly of, I'd write the person off. Never mind that my own favourite authors are Beatrix Potter and A A Milne.

I somehow believe that a person's tastes and choices reveal who they are with far more clarity than any of their assertions ever do. And those choices are not restricted to what they choose to read.

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About 'The Palace of Illusions' from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's site:

"Relevant to today’s war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to the time of the Indian epic The Mahabharat—a time that is half-history, half-myth, and wholly magical. Through her narrator Panchaali, the wife of the legendary five Pandavas brothers, Divakaruni gives us a rare feminist interpretation of an epic story."

Read the first chapter at randomhouse.com/doubleday/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385515993&view=excerpt

Experiences in Delhi's Buses

Somehow, travelling in buses seems to offer one, possibly not a greater insight into the lives of people, but at least a much wider view of the lives of people than travelling by any other means of transport does in Delhi: the metro is too crowded to do anything other than try to stay alive by ensuring that one has enough space to breathe in it, and cars, along with other forms of private transport, for obvious reasons, make it next to impossible for one to see beyond the end of one’s nose (while travelling, anyway).

That being said, it isn’t always clear that the sights which travelling in a bus are sights which one would actually want to see, nor are the experiences which one has necessarily those which one would want to have.

In the last twelve hours, I’ve seen in buses, a man with an awful wound on his leg – his skin had peeled off and the wound was white in places. It seemed pretty clear that he hadn’t had access to good medical care, if at all any medical care; God knows, I’ve never seen a wound like that on a middle class person or anyone higher up on the socio-economic scale.

After that, I found that there was no place to sit down on the bus. There were some seats reserved for women, and I asked a man sitting in one of them to get up, and give me the seat. He wasn’t pleased and said so in no uncertain terms, on the top of his voice, to everyone within earshot. And there’s a part of me which sympathises with what his sentiments: he said that he had paid for a ticket too and that he shouldn’t have to get up just because the seat was reserved for women.

Ordinarily, I don’t think that I would have asked him to get up but I was feeling ill and tired, and I wanted to sit down. It seemed so much easier to tell the chap that he was sitting in a seat reserved for women, than to try explaining that I didn’t feel well especially considering that I didn’t look unwell at all. I wouldn’t want to try telling anyone that I wasn’t feeling unwell unless my being unwell was clearly visible for fear of encountering disbelieving looks and protestations pointing out that I didn’t in fact look unwell. If there was one stereotype that I would love to see changed, it is the stereotype that people who are not well or who are not abled-bodied for whatever reason must also look unwell or disabled at first glance.

Of course, it didn’t really help that the Women’s Reservation Bill has been in the news, and the very idea of reservations for women in any arena whether it be in law-making bodies or in buses is not something which many men (at least among those I know) are especially enthusiastic about.

Finally, I spent what felt like hours sitting next to a woman sobbing her heart out. She was holding a baby and I have no idea of what she was upset about – she didn’t respond when I asked her and I ultimately figured that it’d be kinder to give her what space she seemed to want. She seemed to be alone while she was sitting next to me, but when she got off the bus, it wasn’t alone. Some man, who I assumed was her husband, tapped her on the shoulder and the three of them – man, woman, and baby – got off the bus. I was left wondering why on earth he had left her entirely to her own devices all the time that she was crying.

I’m not entirely certain what to make of travelling in Delhi’s buses.

Medea and Criminal Liability

Euripides' Medea has defined the modern perception of her. Some time ago, the Teatro Instabile Di Aosta presented, in Delhi, a contemporary revisiting of Euripides' Medea in a play based on the texts of Euripides and Pasolini revolving around “discriminations and forbearance, power and revenge, and the meeting of two extremely different worlds; the one that is logical and rational, and the other one that grapples with the possible reality of mythology and ritual,” as the brochure said. The performance was meant to portray the universality and power floating in the story culminating in the “terrible decision that Medea comes to as a result of her painful suffering.”

Her “painful suffering” was the suffering which her husband Jason inflicted on her by being unfaithful to her and marrying Glauce, a princess to further his political ambitions. He justified himself by saying that he could not pass up the opportunity to wed a princess, and Medea was, after all, a barbarian woman, never mind that she was a barbarian woman who'd given up family, home, and homeland for him. He ultimately, apparently, planned to "unite" the two families -- his family with Medea, and with Glauce -- and turn Medea into his mistress.

Medea's "terrible decision" was the plan she decided to execute to revenge herself on Jason -- she killed Glauce (and, Glauce's father, Creon) using a poisoned dress, and killed the two children she had had with Jason in order to spite Jason and cause him as much pain as possible, or so one interpretation runs. Whether or not she should have been held accountable is debatable though.

Jason had supposedly remarried so that he could have children with Glauce. And when Glauce and his father-in-law were murdered by Medea, he apparently rushed to find the children he had had with Medea so that they would not be subjected to revenge because of their mother's act. It could well be argued that one of Medea's aims in killing her children was to spare them death at the hands of her enemies.

Then again, by killing the children, she effectively killed a part of Jason. And perhaps that was the ultimate revenge: Jason wanted children, and she not only deprived him of the possibility of having children with Glauce but also killed the children he had already had with her. To kill the children for a reason that was anything but altruistic would involve viewing the children not so much as individuals in themselves but as extensions of their father, which perhaps could be understood given that contemporary Greek society was intensely patriarchal, and viewed women mainly as breeders and chattel.

Contemporary Athenian law also allowed a man to marry and have children by a citizen woman while keeping a foreign woman who was not a citizen, in this case, Medea, as a concubine. And as far as divorce was concerned, all a man had to do was formally repudiate his wife, and send her back to her father or other male guardian with her dowry. There were two reasons who this did not apply to Jason and Medea though: firstly, Medea had contracted her own marriage, and as such, she had no one she could be "returned to". Secondly, Jason had sworn to be wed to Medea before Zeus and Hera, and as such, by divorcing her, he had in fact, broken an oath to the Gods.

Whether on not Medea is, or should be, criminally culpable is an open question though lying on thoroughly ambiguous moral ground. Medea was obviously distraught at the time she developed her plan for revenge. The murders were premeditated to the extent that she did not commit them on the spur of the moment. However, she developed the plan at a time when she was quite obviously not emotionally stable. And the duration of the time from when she first conceived of the plan to the time when she executed it was short.

In addition to this, there is the question of provocation. In law, if a person commits a crime in consequence of being provoked, their criminal liability could be diminished to the point of being non-existent. It isn't clear whether Jason's conduct would be viewed as "adequate provocation" to cause Medea to commit multiple murders -- presumably, it was not unheard of conduct at the time the play was written -- although it would be difficult to argue that Medea's committing the murders had nothing to do with her being cast off, and banished. She lived in a society in which she seems to have had no recourse to any form of justice, as a "barbarian" woman she was especially disadvantaged, and being exiled would have left her in an entirely hopeless position.

Medea states in the play that she knows her own mind, and that she knows that what she is doing is wrong. However, given that the act which seems to have spurred her to commit the murders is her banishment with immediate effect by Creon, Glauce's father, it is unlikely that she did actually know her own mind.

She managed (by being manipulative) to get a twenty-four hour grace period from Creon, during which time she both planned and executed the murders. Jason arrived to meet her after Creon left her, and insulted her. It was in these twenty-four hours that she planned and committed the murders. In the play, she is simply not decisive with regard to murdering her children until the last possible moment.

Medea unequivocally states in the play that she is an autonomous individual -- an assertion which in itself would have been questionable especially given that women were subject to the rule of men in a very literal sense with little autonomy of their own. Perhaps in the way that Glauce seems to have been little beyond a pawn in the schemes of her father and Jason, and who died because of those schemes.

Medea, however, managed to thoroughly subvert Jason's schemes, and escape the consequences of her actions. At the end of the play, she is shown escaping in a chariot provided by the Gods -- leaving no doubt of whom they supported. She speaks in a voice which is reminiscent of that used by the Gods, cold and distant. Driven to murder by Jason, she is ultimately far removed from emotion itself, it would seem.

Image: Medea by Sandys from WikiCommons