Naïveté

Back when I was an undergraduate student, a few of us went to Ooty and Coonoor for a couple of days.  We were young men; naturally, we were idiots.  Naive adventurers.  It was either at Lamb's Rock or at Dolhin's Nose that we were sitting at the very edge of the rock formation, without considering the risks that we were taking.

It was during this trip that I tried smoking different types of cigarettes, in order to see if anything might interest me.  A puff from each, and it was successively worse.  The worst of them all was the menthol cigarette.  To this day, I cannot imagine why people smoke cigarettes!

As the names Lamb's Rock and Dolphin's Nose suggest, these are colonial legacies.  The melanin-deprived colonizers set up "hill stations" in higher altitudes in order to cool themselves during the peak weeks of summer.  Many of these also became places where they established boarding schools and military academies--for the colonizers and for the natives who wanted to be like their masters.

A couple of miles away from Coonoor is Wellington--another settler name, of course--which is home to India's defense training college.  Recently, India's highest military officer was on his way to the college when the helicopter in which he was traveling crashed, killing him, his wife, and others who were on board.

A wisecracking YouTuber in Tamil Nadu ranted something critical of this crash, for which he was immediately charged.  The high court dismissed the charges against him and, in doing so, quoted Orhan Pamuk:

The judge also referred to how Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk differentiates between a naive and sentimental novelist. He said, "The naive write spontaneously almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual and ethical consequences of their words and paying any attention to what others might say," adding that Maridhas’s post could be categorised as naive writing.

It shouldn't surprise any of us that Pamuk was quoted in a judicial ruling.  Great writers offer plenty of thoughtful observations about humanity.

Pamuk himself ran into trouble with his government, which accused him of insulting Turkishness.  This too shouldn't surprise any of us; authoritarian governments of strongman leaders do what authoritarian governments of strongman leaders do!

As even my blog shows, I have often found Pamuk's thoughts to be wise and informative.  I liked how he phrased the ascendance of writers from outside Europe and North America:

When I began writing, no one cared about Turkey, no one knew about Turkey. In 1985 I went to America for two years and began to write The Black Book around then. Finding that my voice was getting stronger, I really remember thinking, ‘my God these Latin American writers are so lucky, who cares about Turkish writers or Middle Eastern writers or Muslim or Indian or Pakistani writers?’ That’s what I thought then. But the situation has changed in 25 years and during that change my books boomed, I am happy to say that. There are political reasons, cultural reasons, history, all of which changed the world. And now I would say that a big writer from Turkey or the Middle East or India is more visible. Salman Rushdie, for example, was visible in 1981. It all began after that.  ...

I'm sure we will be reading more Indian literature, because Indian literature in English is slightly more visible, than say, Chinese or Latin American. But I would say, the private lives of non-western nations will be more visible in future. That I can only say. Non-western writers will be more visible and domination of the European-American small world – they were dominating the whole world – that domination will be less. But it's not an animosity, it's not a clash, it's a friendship. We have learned the art of the novel from them – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann. These are my brothers; I am not fighting with them.

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, and more were the authors I read when I was an undergraduate.  I learnt a lot from them.  And now, for the first time, I am all set to read one of Orhan Pamuk's novels.